🏠 Home · 📚 Library · 🚀 About RocketLevel · 📘 Playbooks · 🗺️ Free Market Report · 📅 Book a Call
A RocketLevel guide for restoration owners, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About an 8-minute read.
<aside> 📋
Make your own copy. Open the 13-Week Cash-Flow Forecast; Google will prompt you to save your own copy. Enter your starting bank balance and fill in the input cells under each week; the totals, net change, and ending balance calculate automatically. It is yours to keep and edit. A forecast is only an estimate built from the numbers you enter, so check your plan with your own accountant.
</aside>
There is a particular kind of bad week that catches good restoration companies off guard. The jobs are running, the profit-and-loss looks healthy, the pipeline is full, and then payroll Friday arrives and the bank balance is short. Nobody saw it coming because everyone was watching the wrong number. Profit told them the business was sound. Cash told a different story, and payroll comes out of cash.
The gap between those two numbers is the pay lag, and in restoration it is brutal. You pay for labor, equipment, and materials the week the work happens. You get paid weeks later, and on the slow files a quarter later, after the carrier reviews, the program releases, or the commercial client runs your invoice through accounts payable. The 2025 Construction Financial Benchmarker from the Construction Financial Management Association (CFMA) put days in accounts receivable at 55 across 1,558 construction companies, mostly US-based, for fiscal year 2024, so a shop sitting at 60 is already on the slow side of ordinary. Ninety days and past it is the tail, and in RocketLevel's experience commercial accounts make up much of it. A 13-week rolling cash-flow forecast is the tool that lets you see the distance between those two events, week by week, before it turns into a missed payroll.
Profit and cash answer two different questions. Profit asks whether the work you did was worth more than what it cost. Cash asks whether you have money in the bank this Friday. A job can be wildly profitable and still drain your account for three months while you wait to collect. Grow fast and the problem gets worse, because every new job is more cash going out before any of the earlier jobs pay you back. That is how a busy, growing, profitable shop ends up short on payroll.
The forecast fixes this by tracking what keeps the doors open: the actual movement of cash in and out of your bank account, projected forward. That means dollars landing and dollars leaving, week by week, for the next thirteen weeks, not revenue booked or profit earned.
Thirteen weeks is one quarter. It is long enough to see a slow-paying large loss work its way through your account, and short enough that you can actually estimate each week with some confidence. A 12-month cash forecast is mostly guessing; a 13-week forecast is close enough to the present that your numbers mean something, yet far enough out to give you time to act.
Rolling means you do not build it once and file it. Every week you drop the week that just closed, add a new week 13 on the end, and update every number in between with what you actually know now. A forecast you built six weeks ago and never touched only tells you what you used to expect. Refresh it every week and it warns you early.
The forecast begins with one hard, real number: the cash in your operating account right now. Leave out the line of credit and any money you are expecting, and use what is actually there today. That is your starting balance for week 1.
From there, the logic is simple and it never changes: starting balance, plus the cash you expect to collect that week, minus the cash you expect to pay out that week, equals your ending balance. That ending balance becomes the starting balance for the next week. Chain thirteen of those together and you can see, today, roughly where your bank account stands every Friday for the next quarter.
Inflows are the money you actually expect to land in the bank each week. Forecast each one by the week you realistically expect to collect it.
Work through your open receivables job by job and customer by customer. For each one, ask a blunt question: which week is this money actually going to hit the account? A commercial client on 90-day terms whose invoice went out three weeks ago belongs nine or ten weeks out, not next week. A residential deductible you can collect on completion belongs the week the job wraps. A program payment lands on that program's real-world rhythm, not its promised one. Then add the other ways cash comes in: deposits on new work, progress draws on jobs in flight, and any retainage you expect to be released. Be honest and lean. Optimism about collections will wreck a cash forecast faster than anything else.