Whenever I read any business book, one of the things that will always be mentioned (normally in bold, underlined and sometimes with its own chapter) is that cashflow is the life and death of any business.  It doesn’t matter if you are a contractor, a freelancer, a small business owner or a multi-national, if you don’t have a revenue stream from happy customers ready to pay their invoices, sooner or later your bank balance will dwindle away and your business will fail.

So it’s critical that you know in advance when your business bank account is looking good, and when it needs attention – either in the form of a reduction in costs, or raising of more invoices.

I am a great fan of the FreeAgent accounts, invoicing and payroll system – it does almost everything I need to deal with business money matters quickly and easily from quotes, to invoices, to payments through to taxes – both company and personal.  However, it does not do cashflow forecasting (Freeagent prefers to concentrate on getting the accounting right).   So it’s good to see that an independent company has created a separate, but integrated web application called Float which deals with the missing cash flow forecasts.

Float links with Freeagent accounts and pulls in the account transactions, scheduled bills and invoices generated.  Once in Float, transactions can be set to one-offs or reoccurring (monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc).  Float pulls in both income and expenditure transactions, and can match new transactions against the scheduled events.  Using the current state of the Freeagent accounts, and the predefined reoccurring or scheduled transactions, Float will then produce some nice cash flow forecast models via charts, monthly tables and yearly projections – perfect for spotting time periods which need attention or which period of time is best to make that large asset purchase.

Float is currently in beta test mode, with development still ongoing, but they are accepting testers and beta users.   If you are a Freeagent user (and I will always recommend it to any small business), Float looks like it is going to be the perfect cashflow control and analysis tool to bolt on to the accounts service.