AI Cash Flow Forecasting

Treasury and finance teams running Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations rarely argue with the ledger. They argue with the forecast.

Native cash flow forecasting in F&O is a due-date engine. It reads open customer and vendor transactions, purchase and sales orders, budget register entries and forecast positions, applies the cash flow forecasting setup configured against your main accounts and posting types, and projects those movements onto a calendar. It is exact about what is contractually due. It says nothing about what will actually clear the bank. A customer on 30-day terms whose last dozen settlements all landed two to three weeks late is still projected as a day-30 receipt. A vendor you habitually pay in the next payment run after approval is still projected on the invoice due date. Multiply that across legal entities, currencies, cash-discount behaviour and thousands of open lines, and the projection stops being something anyone makes a funding decision on.

The result is the pattern we see repeatedly: the forecast lives outside the ERP. Someone exports aging and open payables to a spreadsheet every Monday, applies judgement from memory, translates currencies by hand, and produces a number that cannot be drilled into, reproduced, or compared against what actually happened. The ERP holds the data; the spreadsheet holds the decision.

What ECOSIRE builds for you

We build a cash forecasting application inside your F&O environment as an X++ extension in its own model, using Chain of Command and standard extension points. Nothing is overlayered, so your One Version updates stay routine. The app extends the standard cash flow forecast rather than replacing it: your existing ledger cash flow forecasting setup, main-account defaults and posting-type configuration continue to drive the base projection, and our layer adds behaviour, probability, currency and scenario on top of it.

Payment behaviour modelling

We build a scoring layer over settlement history. For each customer account we analyse CustTrans and CustSettlement records to derive a days-beyond-terms distribution, partial-settlement patterns, credit-note and dispute frequency, and seasonality where the history supports it. Every open invoice in CustTransOpen then carries an expected settlement date with a confidence band alongside its contractual PaymTerm due date. The vendor side is modelled the same way from VendTrans and VendTransOpen, including whether your organisation actually takes the cash discounts configured in PaymTerm and cash discount setup, and how long approved invoices typically wait for the next payment proposal run.

The model is explainable by design. Every predicted date can be traced to the history that produced it, because a treasurer who cannot explain a number will not use it.

The bank position, not just the projection

A forecast is only as good as the opening balance it starts from. We anchor the position on BankAccountTable and, where you use advanced bank reconciliation, on the reconciled balance from imported statements (MT940, BAI2 or CAMT formats as configured). Committed but uncleared items, in-transit payments and bank-specific value dating are carried through, so the position on screen is the position your bank will report.

Legal entities, currencies and dimensions

Group treasury needs one number. We build cross-company retrieval across the legal entities you nominate, translate to a reporting currency using the exchange rate provider and translation configuration already defined in Ledger, and keep the transaction currency visible underneath so nobody loses the FX exposure in the aggregation. Every figure is sliceable by financial dimension through the DimensionAttributeValueCombination and the dimension sets you already maintain, so the same forecast serves the group treasurer, the entity controller and the business-unit finance manager without three separate reports.

Scenarios and variance

Named scenarios are stored as data and computed by the batch framework: a base case, a stressed-collections case, a delayed-capex case, an FX-shock case, or whatever your board actually asks about. Each run is snapshotted, so last month's forecast is still there to be compared against what settled. Forecast-versus-actual variance is the feature that turns a projection into an instrument people trust — and the one almost never present in a spreadsheet process.

Where it appears in F&O

We deliver a dedicated workspace with tiles and list pages, drill-through from every aggregate to the originating CustTrans, VendTrans or bank transaction, and read-only data entities exposed through OData plus a Data Management Framework export project so Power BI, the Office Excel add-in and any downstream treasury tooling consume the same figures rather than a second version of the truth. Recalculation runs as a SysOperation batch job on the batch group and schedule you choose. Where you want machine-learning scoring, we call an Azure Machine Learning or Azure OpenAI Service endpoint in your own subscription from a service class in X++ — and we always ship a deterministic statistical model as the fallback, so the app keeps forecasting if that endpoint is unavailable or you decide not to use one at all.

Who this is for

Group treasurers and treasury analysts consolidating cash across several legal entities and currencies. CFOs and finance directors who need a defensible short-term liquidity view rather than a due-date arithmetic exercise. Controllers and credit managers who already know which customers pay late and want that knowledge in the system instead of in their heads. It is aimed at organisations live on F&O with real settlement history — the behaviour model needs transactions to learn from, and we will tell you at scoping if your history is too thin to support it yet.

How delivery works

This app is built to order. It does not exist as a finished download today, and we will not pretend otherwise.

1. Scoping call. We walk through your legal entity structure, currencies, bank setup, payment terms, dimension usage and existing cash flow forecasting configuration, and agree what the forecast must answer. 2. Fixed quote. You receive a written scope and a fixed price before any code is written. No hourly drift. 3. Build. Typical lead time is two to four weeks depending on the number of legal entities and how much history normalisation is needed. We build in our own development environment against your version. 4. Install in test. We deliver a deployable package through your Lifecycle Services project, install it into your Tier-2 or higher sandbox, configure it against a copy of your data, and run UAT with your finance team. 5. Production. After your sign-off, the same package is promoted to production through your normal LCS release pipeline, in your maintenance window. 6. Support. A hypercare window follows go-live, covering defect fixes and configuration questions, with extension available.

What it deliberately does not do

It does not post journals, initiate payments or move money. It is a forecasting and analysis layer; execution stays in your existing payment processes with your existing approvals. It does not guarantee a prediction — it produces a dated, explainable estimate with a confidence band, and it shows you how wrong the last one was. And it does not replace your bank's own reporting; it reconciles to it.