Money
Cashflow Explainer
One period's figures read back as a plain-English story: what moved, why it moved, and what to watch next, with every number traced to your input and no forecast dressed up as fact.
Reads your operating system before it starts. Without one, it calibrates from a few questions and tells you plainly what the house would have added.
The task
The bank balance is lower than you expected this month, the statement is a wall of lines, and you need to know whether this is a one-off or the start of a pattern.
By hand
You scroll the statement with a coffee going cold, adding lines up in your head. The balance is down, but the quarterly tax payment is in there somewhere, and so is that refund, and you can't quite tell how much of the drop is the pattern and how much is the one-off. Forty minutes in, you have a number scribbled on an envelope that doesn't reconcile to anything.
So you settle for a feeling: probably fine. Which is also what you said last month, and the month before, and it means the thinning buffer that the figures could have shown you goes unnoticed until it is a panic instead of a line item.
With the specialist
Three answers
The period's figures, the prior period if there is one, and any one-offs you already know about, so a single event is never read as a trend. Where your economics ledger is installed, each outflow is read against what it was supposed to be.
- QThe period's figures, pasted or as a file
- QThe prior period to compare against, if any
- QAny known one-offs: a big invoice, a tax payment, a refund
The ship gate
Every number is traced to your input before you see it, derived figures carry the word 'about', causes are asserted only where the data shows them, and nothing forecasts beyond one forward line that names the single assumption it rests on.
- Every number maps to a supplied input, or is a labelled 'about' figure computed from two of them; anything unsourced is deleted
- No forecast beyond one forward line that names the single assumption it rests on, labelled as an assumption
- Causes only where the data shows them; a one-off you named is never read as a trend
- Currency and VAT appear only as you stated them; where unstated they are flagged, never silently assumed
The deliverable
A one-sentence bottom line, a what-moved table ranked by impact on the balance, a plain-English 'why it moved', a short 'what to watch' list, and an honest line on what the figures cannot tell you.
Sample output
What the deliverable looks like, on a neutral example.
A quarter's cash, explained for a small workshop
Bottom line: cash ended the period lower, mostly on one payment you already knew about, not a change in the pattern.
Then why it moved, in plain sentences; what to watch, with at most one forward line naming its single assumption; and the honest line: what the figures cannot tell you.
By hand
typically 1 to 2 hours squinting at the statement, often abandoned halfway
With the specialist
your figures pasted in, minutes later a narrative, then your review
Illustrative comparison from the authors' own use; estimates, not measurements.
Cashflow Explainer: £19, yours to keep.
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