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How do I get a cash flow forecast out of Xero without building a spreadsheet?

Does Xero have a cash flow forecast?

It does, and I want to say that plainly before I say anything else, because the honest answer is inconvenient for me. Xero bought Syft in 2024, rolled its analytics into Xero from 2025, and now calls it Xero Analytics. Syft is a properly good reporting engine. Trends, snapshots, a projection of where cash is heading up to 180 days out: all of it sits inside the screens you already log into. It is on eligible plans rather than every plan, and you need the right user permissions, so check yours. If you have it, turn it on. I have written the full comparison here, and the summary is that anyone selling you cash software who does not mention the one already inside Xero is hoping you never find it.

So that is the forecast question answered. Now the more useful question, which is the one people are actually asking when they type it.

Why a forecast still leaves you doing the thinking

A projection helps you see future receipts, payments and shortfalls. What it does not do is put your net cash next to your cost base and turn the pair into time. That is the conversion that changes how you feel on a Monday morning: not pounds, months.

And there is the quieter problem. A dashboard waits. You have to remember it, open it, pick the right screen, and then know what to conclude from it. In all the years I have been taking the phone call when cash gets tight, I have never met an owner who was short of charts. They were short of somebody saying: here is your number, here is the risk level, here are the two people to ring today.

What does a Xero cash flow add-on actually add?

Fair question, given Xero has its own. Here is what ours adds, and it is deliberately narrow. It reads your Xero. It takes cash, the money owed to you (accounts receivable and other debtors), and then payables and other liabilities. It does not write anything back. Read-only, both directions of the promise: nothing we do can change a figure in your Xero, and nothing in your Xero has to be set up differently for us to connect. The answer is only as good as your books are complete.

Out the other end comes cash, net cash, monthly cost base, a cushion in months and a risk level, plus a short list of priorities: who to chase for payment, review the profit and loss, review a forecast. Then you copy it as an image into a presentation, copy it as text into an email, send it to your inbox, or fire it to your WhatsApp. In the film it lands on my phone while I am still talking.

A worked example: Xero's own Demo Company, end of June

The risk levels, and where the lines sit

The bands are the point of the whole thing, because a number without a verdict is just another number. The cushion is rounded to one decimal place before the bands are applied.

• Critical: net cash at or below zero. No months of cover at all. That is the Demo Company above.
• Very high risk: above zero, but less than one month of the cost base sitting in net cash (0.0 to 0.9 months, rounded to one decimal place).
• High risk: 1.0 to 1.9 months.
• Medium risk: 2.0 to 2.9 months.
• Low risk: a cushion of three months or more.

The full formula and a worked example live on their own page. One thing I will flag: where the maths cannot be done, we say so rather than draw a line. In the film, earlier months could not be calculated from the data available, so the report says that out loud instead of inventing a trend. No guessing. We also raise a flag when something looks off - if monthly costs have moved by more than fifty per cent, for instance, we ask whether your cost base is complete. Think of it as a checklist between you and your bookkeeper.

Do you need cash flow forecasting software, or just the answer?

Depends what is actually stopping you. If your problem is planning - a hire, a raise, a big order - then yes, you want a forecast, and a proper forecasting tool will beat us at that all day. We do not build a rolling cash flow model, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

If your problem is that you genuinely do not know whether this month is fine, that is a different job. You want the position, the verdict and the actions, weekly, without opening anything. Plenty of owners want both. That is fine. Exploration inside Xero, a weekly verdict that arrives on its own, and an honest shortlist of the other tools if you would rather compare before you commit.

Getting it weekly without building a spreadsheet

You can absolutely do all of this yourself. Cash, plus what you are owed, less what you owe (leaving out prepayments), divided by the average monthly cost base over the last two months, refreshed every Monday. If you will genuinely keep that spreadsheet alive, keep it - it is the cheapest option you will ever have, and I have seen owners run one beautifully for years.

The risk is that the week you need it is the week nobody has touched it. What we do is the maintaining. Pick the Xero organisation from the drop-down, pick your month end, click run. Two clicks. The answer arrives every Monday after that with a risk rating and the few things to do about it, and it takes about a minute to read. That is the Weekly Cash Score.

If you are the accountant, bookkeeper or fractional FD

The same run per client, under one login, read-only. That is it. Each client gets its own weekly briefing with its cushion and risk level, and a shareable PDF that does not require handing anyone write access to a ledger. It does not replace the profit and loss and balance sheet you go through with your client, and it is not meant to. It tells you which client to ring first. The practice workflow is its own page.