Cashflow

Cashflow answers the question the budget cannot: not how much, but when. It takes the money already recorded in your contracts and spreads it across calendar months using the dates on your program, so you get a month by month picture of what is due in and what is due out, across every project your organisation runs.

It is a view rather than a model. Nothing in it is typed in. Every figure comes from a schedule of values, a progress claim, a direct cost or a program task that already exists, which is why the forecast moves on its own when the job does.

Find it at Organisation, then Cashflow for the roll-up across every project, and on the Cashflow tab of a project's Program for one job on its own. Both are available to host organisations only.

Where the numbers come from

Cashflow is the join between two things that usually live apart: the contract budget, which knows the amounts, and the program, which knows the dates.

The join is made per line. Open a task on the program, go to its Cashflow tab, and assign the schedule of values items that task delivers. From then on, the money on those lines falls in the months the task occupies.

Three kinds of row appear:

• Contract lines, from a schedule of values on a contract.
• Direct costs, which have no contract behind them.
• Forecast to complete, where a budget code's remaining forecast is assigned to a task rather than a specific contract line.

Actual, pending and projected

Every month cell holds up to three numbers, and the difference between them is the whole point.

Actual is money that has been certified: approved progress claims, taken at their assessed value where a line was assessed and at the claimed value where it was not.

Pending is claims that have been submitted and not yet decided. Real money, not yet certain.

Projected is the rest of the line's value, spread forward across the months of its task.

The chart above the table shows revenue and cost in those bands, and flips between monthly and cumulative. Cumulative is the one to look at when the question is about funding rather than about a particular month.

How the spread is decided

Each assignment carries a distribution method, and there are three.

Linear

Splits the remaining value evenly across every month the task spans. It is the default and it is right most of the time.

Back-loaded

Puts the whole value in the task's final month. Use it for anything paid on completion rather than progressively: a delivery, a lump sum item, a supply order.

S-curve

Weights the value slowly at the start, heavily through the middle and slowly at the end, which is how most physical trades actually spend.

Change the method on an assignment and the forecast redraws immediately. It is worth spending ten minutes on the six biggest packages rather than an afternoon on all of them.

Overdue and unscheduled

Two cases need naming, because they are where a cashflow forecast usually goes quietly wrong.

Overdue is a line whose task has finished and which carries no approved claim. Teralo does not leave it in a month that has passed, which would flatter the forecast; it rolls the value into the current month, where it is still money you are waiting on.

Unscheduled is a schedule of values line with no task assigned. Those rows show their actuals and nothing else, because there are no dates to project against. An unscheduled line is not missing from the forecast so much as missing from the program, and a cashflow that looks light is usually telling you about assignments rather than about the job.

When the claims and the program disagree

Rows are flagged where the money and the dates have come apart, and the four flags are worth reading rather than clearing.

Claimed ahead of schedule and claimed behind schedule mean the certified value does not match where the task says the work should be. One of the two records is wrong, and it is usually the program.

Partially claimed is informational: the line has been claimed but not to completion.

Overdue with no approved claim is the one that costs money. The work is meant to be finished, nothing has been certified against it, and the value has just rolled into this month's forecast.

Across projects

The organisation view rolls up every active project your organisation is on, so the total is the business rather than the job. What it includes is bounded by what you are allowed to see: projects where you do not hold the cashflow view permission are absent from the roll-up, not shown as zero.

That is worth knowing when two people compare totals. A different number usually means a different set of projects rather than a different calculation.

SettingsHost only

Cashflow has no settings page. Everything that shapes it is set where the underlying record lives.

The amounts come from contract schedules of values, variations, claims and direct costs. See Contracts and The contract budget.

The dates and the distribution method are set on the program task, on its Cashflow tab. That is the only place an assignment can be made or changed.

Months are calendar months in the project's own time zone, which matters on a project running in a different state from your office: the current month is the one it is where the job is.

PermissionsHost only

Two permissions, both held at project level even though the page is at organisation level: viewing the cashflow, and managing it, which is what lets somebody create assignments and change a distribution method.

Two things about that are easy to trip over. In the permissions grid they sit under Resource Management rather than Contract Management, next to Program, because the dates are what drive them. And they are per project, so an organisation-wide roll-up quietly shows a different total to two people with different project access.

On top of both, cashflow is host-organisation only: a guest organisation granted the permission still does not get the page. See How permissions work.