13-Week Cash Flow Forecast: Receipts, Disbursements, Liquidity & Variance

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Set up the backbone of Kestrel's 13-week forecast: the available opening cash from the bank statement, a Monday-to-Friday week calendar built with date arithmetic, and a flag for the weeks in which the monthly rent falls due.
• Forecast Kestrel's biggest cash line: what the open receivables will really bring in, spread over the weeks with a collection curve, plus the new invoices that arrive after the collection lag.
• Place Kestrel's one-off receipts (an insurance claim, an asset sale, a tax refund, sublease rent, a grant) into the right forecast week, weight the uncertain ones and add them up per week with SUMIF.
• Forecast Kestrel's payments week by week: a bi-weekly payroll with MOD, rent in the week of the 1st, and supplier payments that combine the open payables with new invoices paid after the payment terms.
• Add the term-loan payments to Kestrel's weekly flows and let the revolving credit facility do its job: draw whatever keeps cash at the minimum, repay whenever there is a surplus, all with MAX and MIN.
• Turn Kestrel's cash and revolver forecast into liquidity, measure the headroom against the lender's minimum-liquidity covenant, count the weeks in breach and chart liquidity against the covenant line.
• Compare Kestrel's first forecast week with the bank, split the variances into timing and permanent, and roll the forecast forward: new opening cash from the actuals and a week-2 forecast that picks up the cash that slipped.
• Pull Kestrel's two quickest cash levers, collecting part of the receipts a week earlier and paying suppliers a week later, and measure how far they lift the cash trough compared with the base case.