Use a small business cash flow projection template If you don't want to build a financial projection from scratch, consider using one of Microsoft's premade templates.

You can use an Excel spreadsheet to forecast either income or cash flow. These two forecasts are related because, ideally, the more your business earns, the more cash it will have available.

For cash-flow projection tools to function properly and provide the most accurate forecasts, your software needs to be accurate with sales, expenses data and the proper dates for all transactions.

Learn how to build an Excel burn rate or cash runway dashboard for your start-up to monitor how long your investment will last at current ...

And once you start the process, you have the template to continue as necessary. I like to have both a monthly budget and cash flow reports to which I can compare actual monthly results.