13-Week Cash Flow Forecast for Texas Small Businesses

Profit and cash are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where small businesses get hurt. You can be profitable on paper and still miss payroll. A 13-week cash flow forecast closes that gap by showing exactly when money lands and when it leaves — week by week — far enough ahead to do something about it.

Thirteen weeks is the sweet spot: long enough to see a full quarter of payroll runs, tax payments, and seasonal swings, short enough to forecast with real accuracy.

Start from cash, not the P&L

A cash forecast begins with your actual combined bank balance today. From there you layer expected cash receipts and disbursements by week — not accruals, not invoices you hope to send, but money actually moving. Each week's ending balance becomes the next week's opening balance. That simple roll-forward is the whole engine.

The four swings that matter most in Texas

Payroll. Map your exact pay dates and amounts, including the weeks with three pay runs if you pay weekly. Payroll is the least flexible outflow you have.

Taxes. Block out estimated tax payment dates, sales-tax remittance, and the Texas franchise tax deadline. These are predictable and large — coordinate the amounts with your CPA, but put the dates on the calendar now.

Debt service. Loan and line-of-credit payments, equipment financing, and any balloon dates belong in the model so they never sneak up.

Collections. This is the variable one. Use your real days-sales-outstanding to time when invoiced revenue actually becomes cash — not when you billed it.

A simple template structure

You do not need expensive software — a clean spreadsheet works. Set up columns for the next 13 weeks and group rows into the categories below.

Red-flag thresholds to watch weekly

A forecast only helps if it triggers action. Set thresholds in advance: a warning when any week's ending balance drops below your operating cash buffer (often 4–8 weeks of fixed costs), a hard alert when projected cash turns negative in any week, and a watch flag when collections slip more than a week behind your normal pattern. When a flag trips, you have weeks of runway to act — pull forward collections, delay discretionary spend, or draw on a line — instead of days.

Make it a weekly habit

The forecast is a living document. Each week, drop in actuals, roll the window forward one week, and re-forecast. Fifteen minutes of weekly maintenance is what turns this from a one-time exercise into an early-warning system. Our free 13-week cash flow model gives you the structure; the discipline is reviewing it every week.