Cash-flow planning in Excel: the guide and a free template

Every founder needs a financial plan, and almost nobody wants to build one from a blank spreadsheet. So we made one you can just use. It is free, it works in both Excel and Google Sheets, and it already has the formulas wired up — so you drop in your numbers and immediately see your cash flow, your cash balance, and how many months of runway you have left.

No email wall, no sign-up. Download it, open it, start planning.

What's inside

The template is deliberately simple. One sheet, twelve months across the top, and the rows a founder actually needs:

The summary rows are formulas, so you never do the math by hand. Change a number anywhere and your cash balance and runway update instantly.

Use it in about 15 minutes

1. Open the template in Excel or import it into Google Sheets.
2. Replace the example revenue lines with your own, month by month.
3. Do the same for your costs.
4. Set your opening cash (what is in the bank today) in the summary block.
5. Read your runway off the bottom row.

That is enough to get going. What follows is the reasoning behind each row — read it to understand what the template is doing on your behalf, or to build your own from the same logic.

Before you start

You need three things: last month's revenue, a list of your monthly costs, and your current bank balance. That is enough to build a useful plan. Don't wait for perfect numbers — estimates you improve later beat a plan you never start.

Build it, step by step

1. Lay out your months. Put month names across the top row, starting one column in (leave column A for labels). Twelve columns gives you a full year. Every number you enter lives under the month it happens in.
2. List your revenue. Down the left, list your income sources, one per row. Fill in what you expect each month, then add a Total revenue row that sums them with a formula like =SUM(B3:B4), copied across all twelve months.
3. List your costs. Below revenue, list every recurring cost on its own row — salaries, marketing, software, rent, and a catch-all for the rest. Add a Total costs row that sums them the same way.
4. Calculate net cash flow. Add a Net cash flow row: total revenue minus total costs, per month. Positive means you made money that month; negative means you burned it.
5. Track your cash balance. Add a Cash at end of month row. Month one is opening cash plus that month's net cash flow; every month after is the previous month's ending cash plus this month's net. Now you can see the exact month your balance dips, or hits zero.
6. Calculate your runway. Average your net cash flow row and flip the sign to get monthly burn, then divide opening cash by that burn. If the result is 6, you have roughly six months at today's pace. If net cash flow is positive, you are cash-flow positive and growth is the constraint, not runway.
7. Add scenarios. Copy the whole sheet twice — a best case and a worst case. In the worst case, cut revenue 20–30% and nudge costs up; in the best case, the reverse. Now you are looking at a range, not a single guess.
8. Keep it updated. Put a 20-minute reminder in your calendar for the first of every month: update last month's actuals, adjust the months ahead, re-read your runway.

What counts as a fixed cost?

A fixed cost stays roughly the same whether you ship 200 orders or 2,000. The usual suspects:

Contrast them with variable costs — COGS, shipping, payment fees, ads — that rise and fall with orders and each get their own treatment. Fixed costs just sit there, month after month.

The "last period" method: carry it forward

The simplest model in any spreadsheet: fill in January, then make every following month equal the one before it. That's a one-cell formula — =B2 — dragged across the row. Change January and the whole row updates.

Handling a known change

Fixed doesn't mean frozen. When you know a cost will step up — a new hire starting in March, a rent increase in July — type the new value in that month and let it carry forward from there.

Where a spreadsheet stops keeping up

A template is a great start, and for a lot of founders it is genuinely enough to begin. But spreadsheets have a well-known failure mode.

That is exactly the gap Foreqast closes. Instead of you re-typing numbers every month, it syncs your accounting data and builds the same cash flow, burn, and runway view automatically, then keeps it current. Same three answers this template gives you, without the manual upkeep, and with a strategy simulator to test decisions before you make them.