Futrli analyses your historical business data to create budget/forecast rows for every account in your Chart of Accounts. For more information about how predictions are created read this article.
The Expenses category is taken from your Profit & Loss statement. If you want to edit Expenses and view your Sales and Costs, Gross and Net Profit, you can also refine every Expense account row on the Profit & Loss page.
Every prediction page has the daily cash flow chart anchored to the top. Just like within the Invoices and Bills page and when editing payment dates of invoices and bills, as you refine Expenses predictions, you'll see your daily cash flow change.
You can scroll backwards on the date row 12 months in the past. You can also scroll forward 3-years into the future. Use the arrows left and right or grab the chart with your mouse and scroll forwards or backwards.
Expenses Prediction page controls
At the top right of the page, you have 3 controls.
Control 1: View forecasts
You can view forecasts that have been saved. When you are finished refining your first forecast, we recommend that you save this as your base “Budget”. Then you can finesse over the top of this with different scenarios for hiring new staff, expanding, moving premises etc. When you have created prediction lines for these scenarios, save them as a new forecast and name them with a unique scenario name.
Control 2: View controls
Your data can be viewed monthly or weekly (both Monday to Sunday and Sunday to Monday). As all of your data is actually stored daily, changing this view is very simple.
Control 3: Cloud accounting control
For Xero users, we can pull through your unreconciled bank transactions. You will also be able to see when the data last synced and “Sync Now”. For all other accounting packages, we cannot get access to the unreconciled bank transactions from the API, but you can still refresh the source data by “Syncing Now”.
Expenses Prediction page Account Row controls
Underneath the date row, you’ll find the Account Row controls.
Control 1: Accruals and Cash flow view
The accruals view, shows your data:
Net of VAT/GST
On the date that the invoice/bill/journal entry/cash sale was raised.
This is the same data view as your Profit & Loss statement.
The cash flow view shows your data:
Gross, with VAT/GST included.
On the date that the invoice/bill/journal entry/cash will be paid.
Control 2: Settings
The settings cog when clicked will show you the underlying account defaults that enable the 3-way (Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow) postings after they have run through the Futrli accounting engine.
They are also where you set up your VAT/GST scheme settings. Both Accruals and Cash schemes are supported. As predictions are created the VAT/GST calculations impact cash flow and the Balance Sheet as they would within your accounting package with actual business data. No more trying to work out this complex calculation in spreadsheets! You can always see your predicted next VAT/GST payment/refund on the Cash Flow Performance page report.
Control 3: Re-order accounts
You want your business to look like your business, so you can reorder (and group: scroll down to see how) your accounts into the order that means the most to you and how you operate.
Control 4: Large/small rows
If you want to view more rows on your screen you can toggle this control to compress the row heights of the accounts below.
Control 5: Export financials
Being able to export your financial data for bank loans, shareholders, or stakeholder reporting is important.
Hit this button to export a 5-year view of your data for the P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash flow statement. 2 years of historical data and 3 years of forecast/budget data. All Account row reordering and account grouping will be preserved and delivered in expandable groups in the Google Sheets export. Export to Excel, or PDF from Google Sheets.
Daily activity report chart
Just as with the daily Cash Flow chart, you have one for your sales activity. This comes in two forms: Accruals and Cash flow. Use this to see your operational sales trends and the efficiency of your credit control at a glance.
Accruals view
Cash flow view
Account rows
Every account within this category is displayed here. When you connect Futrli to your accounting package and it loads for the first time, you will see there are numbers in all of the future periods for all of the account rows where there has been enough data for a prediction to be generated.
Expand accounts to see the predictions that sit underneath them. This is the accruals view collapsed.
The rows indicated with an arrow are all generated by analysing your historical data. The accruals view for sales predictions will always be purple for consistency. The cash flow view for sales predictions will always be green.
Note: There are additional rows for unpaid invoices/bills hitting cash flow in the Cash Flow view. To edit the payment days of unpaid invoices/bills, head to the Invoices page.
Note: Journal predictions may not have cash flow impact on the same account line. In the example below, Interest and Rent’s cash flow impact is seen on the Prepayments account in the Balance Sheet.
Explaining predictions
Every prediction is explained. You need to know how every number has been derived! Read this article if you want to find out about the Prediction Engine.
Every prediction row number can be clicked for the explanation of the basis of the algorithm behind it. Futrli approaches your predictions like a qualified accountant would when reviewing the same data.
Toggling predictions on or off
You might not agree with the Futrli prediction, just as you may not agree with your accountant creating the same forecast, as you know more about your business! If that is the case, toggle off the Futrli prediction and create your own. Category totals, P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow will all be updated.
The same rationale applies to you toggling off your own predictions. You may want to explore different scenarios for your business, this is a quick way to see which one is the best: a product line at one price vs another for instance.
Adding your own predictions
You can add your own predictions to every account. The beauty of Futrli is that as you add sales to your budget or forecast, the VAT/GST, P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow are all updated instantly.
Find out about adding your own predictions.
