How To Use A Cash Flow Planner In QuickBooks?

Intuit company always want to search and introduce the latest methods or processes to assist business owners in enhancing business productivity and growth. QuickBooks has developed an easier way to manage business cash flow via their new cash flow planner functionality. It helps in saving your valuable time to focus more on future planning. 

A cash flow planner is a bilateral tool to help in forecasting your business cash flow. It manages the incoming and outgoing capital of your business. Based on your financial history, it predicts the upcoming capital events in and out of your business. QuickBooks also offers to add on and customize future results to investigate the impact on your cash flow. 

The Cashflow planner lets you modify the events without any effect on your accounting books. It assists you with the informative decisions for savings, expenses, loans and transferring of money. 

Cash flow forecasting gives you reliable information about your business capital and provides the accurate computing of the bank account at the month-end. It always has a dynamic computation and gives you a clear understanding of the cash status for the future and plan efficiently for better management of your financial position. 

Benefits of Cash Flow Planner 

QuickBooks cash flow planner is beneficial to give insights into your business cash flow. It makes convenient management of your finances, cash flow forecasting, and executable insights centrally. There are a few advantages of the cash flow planner:

1. Real-time control panel –

There is no need for spreadsheets in the planner. You will experience the real-time control panel or dashboard to monitor and control from a centralized location. All of your bank accounts get a synchronized display for a specific view of your cash flow status with a single click. 

2. 90-days cash flow estimation –

You can use a cash flow planner effortlessly and assist you without complex excel spreadsheets. It gives you regular detailed information into your cash flow for 90 days well in advance. 

3. Proactive synopsis preparation –

Work for an extra mile ahead of forecasted transactions by adding future money in and out to observe the cash flow for the upcoming 90 days. You can plan and predict the impact of your business cash for the expenditure such as procurement of new resources or recruitment of employees. It helps you to control the cash flow. 

Cash flow forecasting 

The cash flow planner utilizes the historical financial data of your bank accounts in connection with QuickBooks to predict future redundant income and expenditure. It allows you to add data manually to predict cash flow with additional events that happen in future. 

The data not included in the cash flow planner are:

• Credit card transactions,
• Manually entered transactions in QuickBooks,
• Files enabling multiple currencies. 

Setting up your cash flow planner 

1. Go into the Cash Flow menu,
2. Click on the Planner, 
3. Follow the instructions on the screen to set up the planner. 

QuickBooks can automatically examine the transactions of your business linked bank accounts and forecast the incoming and outgoing capital events. You can view the Linked Accounts section of the cash flow menu. 

How to forecast cash flow?

You can follow the below-listed steps for using the forecasting feature of the cash flow planner. 

The cash flow planner gets data from a few locations:

• Linked bank and credit card accounts,
• QuickBooks transactions entered with a future due date,
• The events get added manually into the planner.

Steps to get the latest forecast:

Procedure 1- 

1. Go into the Cash Flow menu. 
2. Click on Planner.
3. Select the date range below Today’s Balance to define the prediction range. 
4. Click on All, Money In and Money Out filters to refine the list. 
5. Move the bar in the chart to set the date. It will display a list of events that affects your cash flow. 

Procedure 2 –

1. Go into the Cash Flow menu. 
2. Click on the Projected Balance section and then click on Explore Projections. 
3. Select the date range for setting up the prediction range. 
4. Click on All, Money In and Money Out filters to separate the list.
5. Move the bar in the chart to set the date. It will display a list of events that affects your cash flow. 

Adding of events for potential money in or out 

You can add on events manually for possible income and expenditures. For instance, if any big sale is about to happen, you can include this as an event for the forecast. However, remember that these events are not authentic transactions, and they won’t affect the financial accounting in QuickBooks.

Click on the Add Event button:

1. Click on the Money In for events related to income and Click on Money Out for expenditures. 
2. Provide the event name and enter an amount, then click on Continue. 
3. Select the date range for the event that will happen. 
4. Click on Save once it’s finished. 

For editing and deleting an event:

1. Click on open to open an event.
2. Select the Date, Merchant Name, or Amount field, or modify it according to Money In or Money Out. 
3. Click on Save to save the event. 

Conclusion 

With the detailed discussion about cash flow planners in QuickBooks, we know that it uses the previous data of your bank accounts linked with QuickBooks to predict the future recurring income and expenditure. You can add data manually to foretell the cash flow by adding events that might happen in the future. 

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