AR + AP + statutory calendar + stress scenarios — cash flow forecasting software rolling 13-week forecast in 60 seconds.
Building a 13-week rolling cash flow forecast manually is a 3–5 day exercise for mid-market finance teams — and the model breaks the moment scenarios, MSME flags, or statutory due dates are added.
Controller exports AR aging, AP aging, recurring-outflows calendar, cleans date formats, infers missing due dates from payment terms, then hand-builds a weekly waterfall in Excel. The forecast is stale before it is finished.
Raw sub-ledger dates don’t reflect real timing. Customers pay 3–10 days late; GST is due on the 20th; TDS on the 7th. Ignoring lag overstates early-week inflows; missing statutory dates misstates outflow weeks by up to three weeks.
Bills for MSME-flagged vendors must be paid within 45 days under Section 15 of the MSMED Act 2006; any overdue MSME payable triggers a tax disallowance under Section 43B(h). Most Excel forecasts treat MSME and non-MSME vendors identically.
If a single customer’s outstanding exceeds 30% of total AR, their payment timing alone moves the closing balance by more than the covenant buffer. Manual Excel models rarely run consistent stress scenarios — the forecast is wrong before treasury reads it.
Per monthly forecast cycle spent reconciling formula errors across 13 weekly columns. An auditor reviewing the forecast under ICAI SA 315 (Identifying and Assessing the Risks of Material Misstatement) will flag an unmonitored covenant or undisclosed MSME overdue as a control deficiency.
The 13-week liquidity forecast is the document lenders, credit rating agencies, and internal audit committees request first when assessing liquidity adequacy. Four regulatory anchors govern its precision.
Ind AS 7 requires disclosure of cash and cash equivalents alongside a statement of cash flows. ICAI guidance on treasury management for mid-market entities specifies the 13-week rolling forecast as the primary short-term cash visibility tool tested under SA 315 internal control review.
Bills for vendors registered under the MSMED Act must be paid within 45 days of acceptance. The 13-week forecast must surface overdue MSME payables to the current-week immediate-payment priority list, or the company faces interest at three times the bank rate plus reputational exposure to the MSME Facilitation Council.
Any MSME payable outstanding beyond 45 days of acceptance is disallowed as a business expense for the relevant assessment year under Section 43B(h). A forecast that doesn’t flag overdue MSME amounts creates a direct deferred tax cost the auditor must adjust at year-end.
GST due on the 20th of the following month under Section 39 CGST Act 2017; TDS on the 7th under Section 200 IT Act 1961; PF on the 15th under the EPF & MP Act 1952; PT deadlines vary by state. Each must land in the correct weekly bucket or the forecast misstates the outflow week.
Seven deterministic passes from three file uploads to a fully bucketed, covenant-monitored cash waterfall with stress scenarios — in under 60 seconds per run.
Three Excel uploads ingested: Open AR Aging, Open AP Aging, Recurring Outflows Calendar. Each row parsed for customer / vendor name, invoice no, due date, amount, payment terms, MSME flag, currency, and historical pay lag.
All dates normalised to ISO week numbers (week 1 to week 13) anchored on the forecast run date. Missing due dates derived from bill_date + payment_terms (e.g. Net 30) and flagged as due date inferred in the exception queue.
Each AR row’s lag-corrected expected collection date computed as due_date + historical_pay_lag_days. Customers consistently paying 7 days late are bucketed 7 days later than their face due date — eliminating the systematic overstatement of early-week inflows.
Recurring outflows (payroll, GST, TDS, PF, PT, rent, EMI, utilities, advance tax) projected forward across all 13 weeks. Each occurrence placed in the correct weekly bucket by its statutory or contractual due date — eliminating misplaced quarterly advance tax and missed PT deadlines.
Per-week opening balance → inflows → outflows → closing balance computed for all 13 weeks. Opening balance for week 0 pulled from the bank balance feed where available; subsequent weeks chain forward through the waterfall with full traceability to source invoice / bill numbers.
Three exception engines run per row: closing balance below covenant threshold (Rs 50 lakh default) triggers covenant-breach badge with the precise shortfall; single customer > 30% of AR triggers concentration risk; MSME overdue >45 days routes to current-week immediate-payment priority list.
Two scenarios run automatically: Top-3 Customer Delay re-buckets the three largest AR balances by one additional pay-lag period; 10% AR Haircut reduces every AR inflow bucket by 10%. Base case + both scenarios exported as named Excel tabs ready for the treasury review meeting.
The workflow ships with a battery of synthetic test scenarios that exercise every failure mode we have seen in real-world data. Each scenario produces a deterministic outcome that an auditor or controller can verify in seconds.
Seeded sample files used to demonstrate this workflow. Each one exercises a specific scenario or failure mode.
Baseline open AR aging with customer name, invoice number, due date, outstanding amount in Rs, payment terms, and historical pay-lag days. Used to generate the base-case inflow buckets across all 13 weeks.
Baseline open AP aging including Acme Corp Ltd bill ACME/2026/0871 for Rs 7,20,000 due Net 30. Demonstrates clean outflow bucketing with MSME flag populated as 'No'.
Standard recurring outflows calendar with monthly payroll of Rs 42,00,000 for head office, marked critical. Demonstrates how fixed-cost events are projected forward across all 13 weeks.
AR aging scenario where inflow gaps in weeks 5–6 combine with the Q1 FY27 advance tax outflow to push the week-6 closing balance below the Rs 50 lakh covenant. Used to test breach detection and exception queue.
Contains a quarterly advance tax payment of Rs 65,00,000 due in week 6 (Q1 FY27), flagged as Statutory and Critical. Paired with the matching AR and AP files to produce a deterministic covenant breach in week 6.
AR aging where a single customer represents more than 30% of total open receivables. Used to validate concentration-risk exception logic and confirm the correct week-level impact calculation.
AP aging file containing an MSME-flagged vendor with a due date more than 45 days in the past. Tests Section 15 MSMED Act and Section 43B(h) Income Tax Act overdue detection and immediate-payment prioritization.
The Cadel 13-week cash flow forecasting software replaces three-to-five days of ERP-extract-and-clean Excel work with a deterministic 60-second run — overlaying lag correction, MSME overdue detection, and two built-in stress scenarios on every refresh.
The questions accountants and finance controllers ask most often before deploying this workflow.
The AP aging component enforces Section 15 of the MSMED Act 2006 (45-day payment obligation to MSME vendors) and Section 43B(h) of the Income Tax Act 1961 (disallowance of MSME payables beyond 45 days). The minimum cash covenant of Rs 50 lakh is a user-configurable threshold that can reflect a working capital facility agreement, a lender's financial covenant, or an internal treasury policy under Ind AS 7 (Statement of Cash Flows) disclosure requirements. GST, TDS, PF, and PT statutory dues in the recurring outflows calendar align with their respective statutory due dates under the CGST Act 2017, Income Tax Act 1961, and EPF & MP Act 1952.
For AR inflows, the workflow takes the invoice due_date and adds the customer's historical_pay_lag_days to produce an adjusted expected receipt date, which is then mapped to whichever of the 13 ISO week buckets that date falls in. For AP outflows, payments are assumed on the stated due_date with no lag applied unless the user overrides this. Recurring outflows are projected forward from their due_date using the stated frequency (monthly, quarterly, etc.) to populate all relevant weeks within the 13-week horizon.
Each workflow run is scoped to a single legal entity (e.g., Acme Corp Pvt Ltd) and a single functional currency (INR by default). For multi-entity groups, the controller runs one instance per entity and consolidates closing balances manually or via a parent-level Excel export. Multi-currency support — where foreign-currency AR or AP is translated to INR at a spot or forward rate — is on the Cadel product roadmap and is not yet available in this workflow version.
The workflow accepts standard XLSX exports from any ERP or accounting system. For Tally Prime, the AR aging report exported via Gateway of Tally → Display → Statements of Accounts → Receivables maps directly to the required columns after adding a historical_pay_lag_days column. For Zoho Books and NetSuite, the native aged receivables and aged payables reports require only column renaming before upload. Cadel does not yet offer a direct API connector to these systems; the upload is a manual or scheduled file drop.
Every forecast run is saved as a versioned record in the Cadel inbox with a status badge (clean, covenant breach, concentration risk). The Excel export of the 13-week grid includes the opening balance, itemised inflows, itemised outflows, and closing balance for each week, with each line item traceable to its source document row (invoice number or bill number). Exception queue entries record the exact rule that fired, the threshold value, and the actual value that breached it, providing a complete paper trail for internal audit review under ICAI SA 230 (Audit Documentation) principles.
The covenant threshold is a configurable parameter at the workflow level; controllers can set it to any value that reflects their actual lender covenant or internal cash floor policy. The two built-in stress scenarios — top-3 customer payment delay and 10% AR haircut — run automatically alongside every base-case forecast. Custom scenarios (e.g., a specific large invoice delayed by a user-defined number of days) can be modelled by adjusting the historical_pay_lag_days value for the relevant customer rows in the AR aging upload and re-running the workflow.
The workflow uses the actual historical_pay_lag_days on each open customer row, so seasonal collection patterns (e.g., extended winter lag for hospitality customers, faster collections during festive cycles for retail customers) are embedded at the source data level rather than as a forecast-wide adjustment. For businesses where revenue itself is seasonal — for example a Q4-heavy manufacturer — the AR aging upload should be refreshed weekly so the 13-week window always reflects the latest order-book reality, and the AP aging picks up the supplier payments triggered by that ordering pattern automatically.
Yes. Where the customer has enabled the Acme Bank Connect module, the opening balance for Week 0 is pulled directly from the consolidated bank-balance feed across all configured operating accounts at the start of each forecast run, rather than relying on a manually entered figure. The workflow records the source bank, account number (masked), and balance timestamp on the forecast metadata so the treasury reviewer can verify the opening figure against the live bank statement at any time during the review meeting.
