Cash Flow Forecasting and Treasury View

Ask a SAP Business One finance team for a rolling 13-week cash forecast and you will usually be handed a spreadsheet. It was built on Monday from three exports - customer receivables ageing, vendor liabilities ageing and a bank balance - and by Wednesday it is wrong, because two large invoices were settled, a purchase order was released and the payroll date moved. The document that decides whether you draw on a facility, delay a supplier or release capital expenditure is the least trustworthy artefact in the business.

SAP Business One does include a cash flow forecast report, and for a simple company it is a reasonable start. What it does not model is behaviour: that a particular customer consistently pays well beyond terms whatever the payment terms say; that part of the open sales order book converts to cash this quarter and part slips; that a term loan takes a fixed amount out on the same day every month with a principal and interest split your accrual needs; that a subsidiary's cash sits on another system entirely. It also keeps no history, so nobody can say whether last quarter's forecast was any good.

This extension builds the forecast inside SAP Business One from documents that already exist, adds the commitments that exist nowhere as documents, weights them by observed behaviour, and snapshots every version so accuracy becomes measurable instead of assumed.

What ECOSIRE builds

This is a build-to-order extension. There is no shelf copy and no instant download: we scope your sources, your bucket structure and your treasury reporting, quote it at a fixed price, then build it for your company and install it into your test company database before production. A standard scope is two to four weeks from signed quote to test install.

The deliverable is a SAP Business One add-on reading through the Service Layer (REST/OData), with the DI API used where a client-side component is needed. Its own data - plan lines, loan schedules, scenarios, snapshots - lives in User-Defined Objects and User-Defined Tables, and additional fields on standard objects are User-Defined Fields. By default the forecast reads standard documents and writes nothing back to them. It targets SAP Business One 10.0 on Microsoft SQL Server and on SAP HANA, on-premise or cloud-hosted.

Where the inflows come from

Open A/R Invoices net of Incoming Payments, credit memos and internal reconciliation form the committed receivable layer, dated by Payment Terms and then adjusted by each Business Partner's measured payment behaviour derived from Incoming Payment history. Behind that sits the pipeline layer: open Sales Order lines with delivery dates, Deliveries not yet invoiced, and A/R Down Payment requests, each shown separately with its own conversion assumption. Postdated cheques and other instruments are dated by clearing date, not posting date, because that is when the cash is usable.

Where the outflows come from

Open A/P Invoices and approved Outgoing Payments give the committed payable layer, dated by supplier terms and by your actual payment run calendar rather than by the invoice due date, which is rarely the same thing. Purchase Orders not yet invoiced and Goods Receipt POs awaiting invoice form the committed-but-unbilled layer. Recurring postings, payroll, tax payments, rent, dividends and capital expenditure are captured as manual plan lines in a User-Defined Object so that nothing that matters lives outside the model.

Opening position and bank reality

The forecast starts from a real position: balances per House Bank account taken from posted Bank Statements, plus unpresented items, plus available facility headroom recorded per account. Each account carries a minimum operating balance, so a breach is a flagged event in a specific week rather than something spotted later in a negative total.

Behaviour, confidence and scenarios

Every layer carries a configurable confidence weight, and the receivable weights can be derived per Business Partner or per customer group from measured days beyond terms instead of being typed in. Scenarios - base, best, worst and any you define - vary collection behaviour, order conversion, supplier payment timing and capital expenditure timing without touching a single source document, and can be compared side by side in one view. Buckets are configurable: daily out to a few weeks, weekly out to a quarter or two, monthly beyond that.

The treasury view

One dashboard carries the cash position waterfall, net cash movement by bucket, cumulative closing balance against minimum-balance thresholds, facility utilisation, and the largest expected receipts and payments in the near buckets. Every figure drills through to the underlying A/R Invoice, A/P Invoice, Sales Order, Purchase Order, loan schedule row or plan line, so a number a director questions can be defended in two clicks rather than reconstructed. Alerts can be scheduled to email the treasury recipients when a projected balance breaches a threshold in any bucket.

Snapshots, variance and forecast accuracy

A scheduled job snapshots each forecast version and keeps it. That single decision turns the forecast from an opinion into something you can audit: actual versus forecast by bucket, variance attributed to collection timing, order conversion or unplanned outflows, and forecast accuracy trended over time per bucket horizon. The weightings are then tuned against your own measured error rather than against a rule of thumb.

Currencies, entities and the things not in SAP Business One

Forecasts are produced in transaction, local and reporting currency with a configurable rate source and a per-currency exposure line, so an FX movement is visible as its own effect rather than buried in a converted total. Commitments held outside the system - a loan administered by the bank, a payroll bureau schedule, a subsidiary on another ERP - are brought in as plan lines by template import or an API feed, and each imported source is labelled with its as-of date so nobody mistakes an import for live data.

Who this is for

Businesses where cash is the binding constraint rather than profit: contractors and project businesses with milestone billing, distributors carrying inventory and supplier terms, manufacturers funding long lead times, and any group with debt covenants or a working-capital facility. It is also for the finance function where one person spends the first day of every week rebuilding the same spreadsheet.

How delivery works

1. Scoping call. We map every cash source and commitment, your bucket structure, your payment run calendar, bank accounts and facilities, currencies and reporting audience, and confirm your version, database platform and hosting arrangement. 2. Fixed quote against a written specification. Sources, weighting rules, scenarios, dashboard content and any imports are listed, along with what is out of scope. 3. Build. Development against a copy of your company database so the first forecast you see is built from your own open documents. 4. Install into your test company. Objects, fields, scheduled recalculation job and dashboards deployed, with loan and recurring commitment schedules loaded. 5. Calibration. We run the forecast against a closed historical period and compare it to what actually happened, then tune the weightings before you rely on it. 6. Production install. Scheduled with you, with a documented rollback path. 7. Support window. Defect fixes plus one re-tuning round once you have several forecast cycles of real variance data.

After go-live

You keep the configuration workbook, the named support contact, and retesting against your next SAP Business One patch or upgrade during the support window. Later additions - another entity, a new facility, an extra scenario dimension, a board-pack export - are quoted as changes against the same specification.