🧰 Before You Begin
Before you launch a weekly cash review, get the basics in place. You’ll need up-to-date bank balances for all key accounts, a clean list of open invoices and bills, and clarity on upcoming payroll, tax, and debt repayments. Make sure your accounting system can export AR and AP with due dates – this is crucial for turning accounting data into a usable cash flow statement.
Agree on the time and attendees: usually the owner-manager, finance lead, and, where relevant, operations. Block a consistent slot in the calendar; inconsistency kills the discipline. Decide whether you’ll look at a simple two-week view or a rolling 13-week cash flow forecast; the latter gives more room to plan. Finally, ensure everyone understands the difference between cash vs profit, so no one is surprised when profitable months still show tight liquidity. With these foundations in place, the weekly session becomes fast and focused, not a reporting burden.
🧭 Step-by-Step: Running the Weekly Cash Review
Step 1: Define the Review Window and Scope
Start by choosing your review window. Many SMEs begin with 4-6 weeks, then graduate to a full 13-week cash flow board as confidence grows. Decide which bank accounts and entities are in scope: trading, tax, payroll, and any overdrafts or facilities. For groups, keep entity cash separate but visible, then roll up a simple consolidated view.
Align this window with your broader budgeting and forecasting cycle so it doesn’t live in isolation. Clarify the decisions the meeting will support – approving spend, timing large payments, managing owner drawings, or planning hiring. This keeps the session focused on action, not commentary. Once you’ve defined the scope, freeze a simple layout: opening cash, expected inflows, expected outflows, and closing cash by week. Consistency makes it easier to spot patterns, connect cash forecasting with cash flow vs profit discussions, and compare what you expected against what actually happened.
Step 2: Gather and Clean Your Inputs
Next, pull the data you’ll use each week. Export open invoices and bills with due dates from your accounting platform. If your datasets are messy or column headers are inconsistent, use clean mapping practices or automation to avoid manual column matching every week. Group inflows by type – customer receipts, loan drawdowns, other income – and outflows by payroll, suppliers, tax, rent, and debt service.
Then, sanity-check the lists. Remove duplicated entries, write off clearly unrecoverable invoices, and adjust due dates for known payment behaviours (for example, key customers who always pay one week late). This isn’t about perfect accuracy; it’s about having a realistic, decision-ready view of cash forecasting. Finally, make sure bank balances reconcile with your cash flow statement outputs so the opening position is correct. The goal is a repeatable process that can be run quickly, not a one-off spreadsheet that decays.
Step 3: Build a Simple Near-term Cash View
With clean inputs, drop them into a calendar view. For each week, sum expected inflows and outflows, then calculate net cash movement and closing balance. Start with a basic 6-week layout, then extend to a 13-week cash flow forecast format as the team becomes comfortable. Pull across key dates like payroll runs, rent, loan repayments, and tax obligations so they don’t sneak up on you.
Overlay this with large invoices and bills – especially those tied to seasonality or project milestones – so you can see spikes and troughs. If you run multiple entities, put each one on its own row and a consolidated row underneath. Now you can see where shortfalls may occur, even when the P&L looks healthy. This turns theoretical cash vs profit discussions into a visual, time-based conversation everyone can understand.
Step 4: Run the Weekly Discussion and Make Decisions
In the meeting, walk the team through the next few weeks of cash. Start with today’s balance, then look at the next two to four weeks in detail. Focus on points where closing cash gets uncomfortably close to zero or covenant thresholds. Discuss levers: delaying non-essential capex, rescheduling supplier payments, accelerating collections, or drawing on facilities. Link these decisions back to your broader cash flow foundations and budgeting process.
Use scenario-style thinking rather than dense modelling grids. Ask, “What if this big customer pays a week late?” or “What if we hire two months later?” and quickly adjust the forecast. Over time, consider using dashboards that surface early warning signals automatically. The point of the review is not to admire the forecast; it’s to decide. Close each meeting with a short action list, owners, and due dates, captured in the same place every week.
Step 5: Close the Loop and Improve Over Time
At the start of each session, compare last week’s forecast with actuals: where did reality deviate? Was a large bill paid early, or did a customer pay late? Use these gaps to refine assumptions about timing, not to assign blame. This feedback loop improves your cash forecasting accuracy and builds trust in the process.
As the rhythm matures, connect the weekly review with your project and working-capital models. Bring in insights from project-based cash flow and multi-entity cash flow views where relevant. For growth decisions, link the weekly view to your longer-term budgeting and headcount planning models. Eventually, you’ll have a two-speed system: a tactical 13-week cash flow lens and a strategic planning lens that speak to each other. The owner-manager’s weekly review becomes the heartbeat that keeps both grounded in reality.
⚠️ Tips, Edge Cases & Gotchas
Keep the meeting short and ruthless. If it drifts into general performance discussion, park those topics for another forum. The weekly review is about near-term cash forecasting, not strategy debates. Watch out for “hidden” cash flows – annual insurance, one-off tax settlements, bonus payments – that don’t show up in normal monthly cycles. Add a simple checklist, so they’re not forgotten.
For groups with multiple entities, be explicit about intercompany loans and transfers so multi-entity cash flow remains transparent. Treat overdrafts and revolvers as tools, not default funding; integrate them into the forecast so you can see true available headroom. Finally, don’t overcomplicate the tooling. A simple, well-maintained model you actually use beats a sophisticated system no one updates. When you’re ready, you can always move to a more automated approach or templates that plug into your accounting and banking data.
📊 Example / Quick Illustration
A founder of a $5m services business runs payroll fortnightly and pays suppliers on 30-day terms. On the P&L, months look profitable, but cash is always tight. She sets up a weekly review with a 10-week, 13-week cash flow style board. Each Monday, the team reconciles bank balances, loads open invoices and bills, and updates a simple cash view.
In week three, the board shows payroll, rent, and a tax payment landing in the same week, taking the cash dangerously low. By seeing this early, the founder delays a discretionary equipment purchase, accelerates two collections calls, and nudges out a non-critical supplier payment. The week lands slightly negative on profit vs cash flow, but the bank balance stays healthy. Over a quarter, this routine eliminates last-minute panic and builds lender confidence that the business has real cash flow foundations, not just good intentions.
🚀 Next Steps
You now have a practical blueprint for a weekly cash review that fits into a busy owner-manager schedule. Start with one entity, a six-week window, and a simple board, then evolve toward a full 13-week cash flow forecast as confidence grows. As the habit sticks, connect the meeting with project cash models, working-capital dashboards, and longer-term budgeting. This is where cash flow foundations turn from theory into a real operating system.
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