Introduction to the Cash Flow Planner in QuickBooks Online

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 categorized and uncategorized 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.

1. Select Money in if the event is income, or Money out if it's an expense.
2. Give the event a name and enter an amount, then select Continue.
3. Select the date when the event will occur.
4. When you're done, select Save.

To edit or delete an event:

1. Select and open an event.
2. Select the Date, Merchant Name, or Amount field, or change whether it's Money in or Money out.
3. When you're done, select Save.

Events all have different labels:

• Predicted: Money in and money out events QuickBooks predicts based on your financial history. These are marked with a special icon.
• Invoice, sales receipt, bill, expense, paycheque: Transactions you've entered into QuickBooks.
• Planned: Money in and money out events you manually add to the planner, which aren't included in your regular accounting.

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 CA $100 invoice in QuickBooks. She will see this invoice with an expected amount of CA $100 in the Planner.
• She edits the expected amount to be CA $90. Next time she visits the Planner, she will see the “due amount” is still CA $100 but the “expected amount” is CA $90. The Planner will assume she will receive CA $90 on the due date.
• She then edits the invoice to be CA $110. Next time she visits the Planner, she will see the “due amount” is now CA $110 and the “expected amount” is CA $110. The Planner will assume she will receive CA $110 on the due date.