Business Resources: Cash Flow Tracker
When we first started building budgets, we would estimate how much revenue we were going to have for the year, and plan spending accordingly. We then broke out how much we thought we were going to earn and spend each month into monthly projections.
Spending, of course, never goes exactly as planned. Even the best possible projections are a bit high or a bit low or a bit off in terms of timing. As a result, even though we had a decent idea of our overall revenue and expenses for the year, we didn’t have a good handle on how much actual cash we had available at any given moment.
To solve this problem, we worked with our awesome bookkeeper to develop a cash flow tracker. People had shared cash flow trackers with us before but we hadn’t been able to figure them out.
Here’s a link to our tracker that you can copy and use if you want. Here’s how we use it:
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We estimate (or project) revenue and spending for the year by month.
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We track actual income and expenses by month and compare the actuals with our projections (or estimates).
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We use our actual data to tell us how much cash we actually have.
We put together a video on how we use it and hope it may be helpful to you as well!