How to build a 13-week cash flow forecast on Starch

A 13-week cash flow forecast is a rolling, week-by-week view of what hits your account and what leaves it — covering roughly one quarter ahead. It's different from your P&L (which is accrual-based and backward-looking) and different from a runway calculation (which averages your burn rate). A 13-week forecast tracks timing: when does the customer invoice actually clear, when does payroll hit, when does the rent ACH go out. That timing gap is where operators get into trouble.

What this looks like in practice varies. A SaaS company cares about Stripe payouts landing before payroll. A services firm cares about client payment cycles and contractor disbursements. A product business cares about inventory outlays and when wholesale receivables clear. The mechanics differ, but the need is identical: know what your account balance will actually look like, week by week, before it happens instead of after.

On Starch, your real bank balance and Stripe revenue are always in the forecast — no manual exports, no waiting for your bookkeeper. You end up with a weekly cash dashboard that updates automatically, shows each major outflow category as its own row, and flags the weeks where the balance gets tight. If you want a Slack message every Monday with the week's opening balance and any red-flag weeks ahead, that's there too. The forecast you have on Tuesday morning reflects what actually happened on Monday, not what you last entered into a spreadsheet two weeks ago.