Cashflow & forecasting
Can you afford your next move?
See the cash impact of decisions, alongside the commercial opportunity.
An illustrative workflow, shaped around your systems, records and approvals.
A typical manual workflow
Your team prepares,
checks and produces.
Gather the starting position
Pull bank balances, unpaid invoices, bills and upcoming payments.
Update payment assumptions
Estimate when customers will pay and when costs will leave the bank.
Work through each option
Change hiring, equipment or sales assumptions and check the cash impact.
Explain the decision
Prepare the funding needs, downside and commercial trade-offs.
With Octopi systems
Show the cash impact before you commit.
- Starts with money in the bank, unpaid invoices, supplier bills and planned payments such as wages and tax.
- Uses your expected payment dates and business plans to calculate future cash, profit and funding needs.
- Tests decisions such as adding a crew or buying a vehicle, including what happens if customers pay late or the next job falls through.
Weigh the cash risk against the opportunity.
You or your finance lead set realistic assumptions and weigh the wider opportunity. A break-even job may open doors, but the business still needs to fund the work.
Inside the system
The tools, instructions
and checks behind it.
01Refresh the financial baselineRules + data
Reconcile opening cash and gather unpaid invoices, bills and recorded commitments, including planned wages and tax payments.
Accounting API or export · Structured finance tables
- Input
- Opening cash, receivables, payables and recorded commitments, plus owner-supplied future plans and expected payment dates.
- Output
- A dated, reconciled starting point for the forecast.
- Checks and human role
- Reconcile opening balances and show stale or incomplete data.
02Calculate linked scenariosModel + calculations
Use expected collection dates, planned spending and business assumptions to calculate linked profit, balance sheet and cash forecasts.
Three-way financial model · Versioned assumptions
- Input
- Validated actuals and approved assumptions for the base case and options.
- Output
- Linked forecast results and funding requirements for each scenario.
- Checks and human role
- Check model balance and cash roll-forward. Keep assumptions separate from actuals.
03Explain options and trade-offsAI assistance
Explain when cash is needed, how much is required and what happens if payments or follow-on work do not arrive as planned.
Claude or ChatGPT · Scenario analysis instructions · Reusable instructions: Commercial scenario review
- Input
- Calculated scenario outputs, source references and the owner's commercial context.
- Output
- A comparison of affordability, downside, assumptions and possible strategic value.
- Checks and human role
- AI explains supplied results; the model calculates them. Future work is not treated as guaranteed.
Example instructions
Compare the supplied scenarios for adding a plumbing crew. The initial developer job may break even but could lead to repeat work. Separate committed revenue from potential opportunities. Explain cash required, downside if no follow-on work arrives, and assumptions worth testing. Cite model outputs. Do not decide from short-term margin alone or invent future contracts.
04Apply judgement and decideHuman decision
Weigh funding needs and downside against customer relationships, strategic value and the ability to deliver.
Owner or finance leader · Scenario dashboard
- Input
- Forecast implications, strategic context and the scenario briefing.
- Output
- An informed decision, agreed assumptions and monitoring points.
- Checks and human role
- The business owns the decision and updates assumptions as evidence changes.
Illustrative workflows after setup. Your existing automation, systems and processes determine the work removed. People provide context, resolve exceptions and retain agreed approvals.
What could change for your business?
Spend less on finance.
Get more from it.
Tell us what is taking too much time, costing too much or leaving you without the information you need. Let's explore what the right systems could change.