What is the Cash Flow Planner?
The Cash Flow planner is an interactive tool that forecasts your cash flow, the money going in and out of your business. It looks at your financial history to forecast future money in and money out events. You can also add and adjust future events to see how certain changes affect your cash flow.
You can change events in the planner without affecting or changing your books. This helps you make informed decisions about when to save, spend, borrow, and transfer money.
Learn how to set up and use the Cash Flow Planner here.
How does the forecasting work? What data is included?
The cash flow planner chart uses historical data from your bank accounts connected to QuickBooks Online to forecast future recurring income and expenses. This includes categorised and uncategorised transactions. You can also manually include data to forecast cash flow by adding events that may occur in the future.
The cash flow planner chart doesn't include:
- Credit card transactions
- Trust account transactions
- Transactions you've entered manually into QuickBooks
- Multi-currency enabled files
Note: If you disconnect a bank account, the data won't appear on the chart anymore.
Cash Flow planner numbers explained
The Cash Flow planner only considers transactions that have had money movement (cash flow). Here are some key examples of transactions and how they're displayed in the planner:
- Transactions with GST: Shows the transaction amounts inclusive of GST
- Wage expense: Shows the payroll expense the day the wages are paid to employees
- Payroll: Shows the actual wage paid to employees and will not include PAYG Withholding. PAYG Withholding will be included when the BAS is paid
- Superannuation expense: Shows the transaction the day the superannuation payments were paid to employees
- Credit card payment through bank transfer: If the user pays a credit card bill by transferring money from their account, this will show as a money out transaction
- Loan repayment through bank transfer: If a user pays a loan instalment by transferring money from their account, this will show as a money out transaction
- Bad debt write-off: Will not be picked up as there is no money movement
- Depreciation: Will not show depreciation expense as there is no money movement
The Cash Flow planner now has the ability to predict when a customer will pay your invoice, based on certain due dates. The machine learning model considers the following information to predict the payment date:
- Invoice amount
- Whether the invoice was viewed by the customer
- Whether a payment option, such as Accept Card Payments with PayPal, was enabled
- Whether or not the invoice was sent to the customer
- Invoice payment history
I don't see an option to enable the Cash Flow Planner
The Cash Flow Planner isn't available for companies that have Multicurrency enabled.
I see a notification about overdue transactions in my planner. What does this mean?
This refers to any unpaid QuickBooks invoices or bills for which the due or expected date is now in the past. Because these transactions won't show up in the Planner unless they have due dates or expected dates in the future, this notification will prompt users to update the expected date so that the transaction will show up as a future event in the Planner. Any changes to the expected dates won't change the due dates on the QuickBooks transactions.
Does the cash flow planner automatically update? Does it save my manual input?
The Cash Flow Planner does save all manual user input. If the user makes updates in both the Planner and outside of the Planner in the rest of QuickBooks Online, the Planner will use the last updated amount or date. Here’s an example of how this works:
- A customer creates a A$100 invoice in QuickBooks. She will see this invoice with an expected amount of A$100 in the Planner.
- She edits the expected amount to be A$90. Next time she visits the Planner, she will see the “due amount” is still A$100 but the “expected amount” is A$90. The Planner will assume she will receive A$90 on the due date.
- She then edits the invoice to be A$110. Next time she visits the Planner, she will see the “due amount” is now A$110 and the “expected amount” is A$110. The Planner will assume she will receive A$110 on the due date.