Improved Cash Flow Forecasting in LivePlan for Strategic Advisors

Posted

LivePlan product update

Helping your clients understand their cash flow is an integral part of delivering quality advisory services. But cash flow isn’t just about the current financial position.

Creating an accurate cash flow forecast gives your clients the insight necessary to drive decision making for their business.

To help you build better forecasts for your clients, we’ve improved the process for setting up your accounts receivable and accounts payable terms. LivePlan now allows you to set A/R and A/P terms per individual revenue stream and expense

When setting up your A/R and A/P in the Cash Flow Assumptions page in the forecast, you can now interact with a list of all of your individual revenue streams and expense items. You can directly enter in your average days to pay/get paid, and set up the percentage of sales/purchases on credit. LivePlan will then calculate your projected AR and AP balances for you.

This improved experience gives a much more accurate picture of forecasted cash flow, and can help drive decision making.

Take our fictitious bike shop owner, Garrett, for example. Garrett has a service contract with a local University that he invoices on a monthly basis. He also works with customers to set up payment terms for large, custom orders, which makes up about 10 percent of his new bike sales.

With the updated cash flow forecasting, Garrett can now easily set up terms for these specific revenue streams, so he can get an accurate sense of the timing for his cash inflow.

Cash Flow Forecasting

By combining this new feature with the what-if scenario analysis, Garrett can experiment with potential changes to his revenue streams and expenses. He knows, for example, that the University’s service contract is up for renewal this year, and he is hoping to negotiate a larger deal. Garrett can easily create a copy of his forecast and modify the terms of the revenue stream in order to see the cash flow impact on this potential change.

This improved cash flow forecasting experience allows you to create and deliver more accurate cash flow forecasts for your clients. We’ve also added several other features recently, including QuickBooks Desktop support and full, comparative financial statements in the Dashboard.

Get started with LivePlan today to try this new feature out on your own. We always appreciate feedback—if there’s anything else you’d like to see, let us know by emailing accountants@liveplan.com.

Joey O'Shaughnessy
Joey O'Shaughnessy
Joey is the Channel Manager for Strategic Advisors. In his role he focuses on helping accountants and bookkeepers start, run, and grow their advising practice through LivePlan. He has been with Palo Alto Software for over 3 years and is a graduate of the University of Oregon.
Posted in Budgeting and Forecasting, LivePlan Software for Advisory