13-Week Cash Flow & Lender Reporting
Short-term cash visibility and lender-ready reporting for leveraged companies. We build the 13-week cash flow, manage working capital, and keep covenant reporting clean and on time.
13-Week Cash Flow Forecast
A rolling, receipts-and-disbursements view of cash for the next 13 weeks — the tool that keeps a leveraged or fast-growing company out of a liquidity surprise.
What you get:
- Rolling weekly cash forecastA direct-method model that projects receipts and disbursements week by week, updated as actuals come in.
- Actual vs. forecast variance trackingEach week's actuals are compared to forecast so the model gets sharper and you learn what really drives your cash.
- Runway & minimum-cash alertsClear visibility into how many weeks of runway you have and early warning before you approach a floor.
- Revolver & liquidity planningSee when to draw or pay down the revolver, and plan around it instead of reacting to it.
A build project to stand it up, then a light weekly retainer to run it.
Liquidity & Working Capital
Cash trapped in receivables, payables, and inventory is cash you can put to work. We find it and build the routines to free it up.
Focus areas:
- AR, AP & inventory (cash conversion cycle)We analyze DSO, DPO, and DIO to find where cash is tied up and how much you can reasonably release.
- Collections & payment cadencePractical routines for collections and vendor payment timing that improve cash without damaging relationships.
- Cash conversion improvement planA prioritized set of moves with the expected cash impact of each, so effort goes where the payoff is.
- Weekly liquidity dashboardA single view of cash, availability, and working-capital metrics you and your sponsor can watch each week.
Covenant Compliance & Lender Reporting
Term loans come with reporting obligations and covenants that can't slip. We prepare the package, track the ratios, and flag issues long before a test date.
We prepare:
- Covenant calculations & compliance certificatesLeverage, fixed-charge coverage, and other covenants calculated to the credit agreement, with the certificate ready to sign.
- Borrowing-base reportingAccurate, on-time borrowing-base certificates so availability is never a question mark.
- Covenant headroom forecastingWe forecast covenant ratios forward so you see a tight test coming and can act, not react.
- Monthly / quarterly lender packageThe full reporting package your lender expects, delivered on their schedule and tied back to the financials.
Recurring retainer scoped to your credit agreement and reporting cadence.
Who this is for
This fits leveraged lower-middle-market companies — typically $10M to $150M of revenue — carrying a term loan, a revolver, or both, where the reporting obligations in the credit agreement arrived faster than the finance team did. It fits equally well with no distress at all, when a sponsor has started asking for weekly cash visibility the company has no repeatable way to produce.
You will recognise the situation if:
- Your credit agreement tests covenants quarterly, and the compliance certificate is assembled by hand under time pressure each time.
- Cash is forecast in a spreadsheet that reaches about a month out and gets rebuilt from scratch whenever someone asks.
- Availability under the revolver is something a person has to go and work out rather than something you can see.
- The company has been surprised by its own cash position at least once in the past year.
- A lender or sponsor asked for a 13-week forecast and you produced one once, under duress, and have not updated it since.
If the company carries no debt, holds several months of cash, and has nobody asking for weekly visibility, a 13-week forecast is more machinery than the situation warrants. A monthly cash view inside the operating model is the proportionate answer, and that sits within FP&A work rather than here.
What you actually receive
These are files, not findings. Each one is handed over in a format you can open, audit, and eventually maintain without me — and each is built to the specifics of your credit agreement rather than to a template.
13-week cash flow model
Excel workbookDirect-method receipts and disbursements across thirteen weekly columns, with a dated input tab, a collections-timing build off the AR ageing, and a disbursements build off AP and the payroll calendar. Rolls forward one week at a time rather than being rebuilt.
Weekly cash update
Workbook + one-page summaryThe refreshed model plus a single page showing opening cash, the week's receipts and disbursements, closing cash, revolver availability, and the variance against what was forecast last week — with a line of commentary on anything that moved.
Covenant compliance certificate
Excel + signature-ready PDFLeverage, fixed charge coverage, and any other tested ratios calculated to the definitions written in your credit agreement, with each input traced back to the trial balance so the lender's analyst can follow it.
Borrowing base certificate
Excel workbookEligible receivables and inventory after the exclusions and advance rates your facility specifies, producing the availability figure on the schedule the agreement requires.
Covenant headroom forecast
Model tabTested ratios projected across the next four quarters against their covenant levels, so a tightening test appears as a trend rather than as a result.
Working capital diagnostic
Analysis + action listDSO, DPO and DIO decomposed, with a prioritised list of moves and the estimated cash release attached to each, so effort goes where the money is.
How an engagement runs
Read the agreement, build the first forecast
I read the credit agreement properly — definitions, tests, reporting obligations, cure rights — and walk the cash process with whoever runs it today. A first working 13-week model is live inside the first three weeks, deliberately rough in places, because a forecast being used and corrected beats a perfect one delivered in week six.
Calibrate against reality
Four or five weekly cycles of forecast against actual is what turns assumptions into a model that holds. Collection timing gets tuned to what customers actually do. The covenant calculations get reconciled to the last certificate the lender accepted, so there is no disagreement about the starting point.
A weekly rhythm and a quarterly package
The weekly update lands on a fixed day. The compliance certificate and lender package go out on the schedule the agreement dictates, prepared ahead of the deadline rather than against it. Headroom is reforecast monthly, and anything approaching a test level is raised as soon as it appears.
What this looks like in practice
Consider a specialty distributor: $48M of revenue, sponsor-owned for eighteen months, carrying a $14M term loan and a $6M revolver. The credit agreement tests total leverage quarterly at a maximum of 3.50x and fixed charge coverage at a minimum of 1.20x. The controller closes the month reliably. Nobody can say what cash looks like in week nine.
Reading the agreement surfaces that EBITDA is defined with a cap on add-backs the company had been applying without limit — meaning the leverage ratio it believed it had was understated. Actual trailing EBITDA for covenant purposes is $4.1M, not the $4.6M being used internally.
The first 13-week model shows a trough in week nine: a quarterly debt service payment and a payroll fall in the same week that a $900K customer payment is scheduled to arrive — and that customer has averaged 47 days against 30-day terms all year.
Leverage recalculated correctly is $14M ÷ $4.1M = 3.41x, against a 3.50x maximum. Headroom is $0.4M of EBITDA, not the $1.7M the old figure implied. The forecast shows Q3 EBITDA softening, which would put the ratio through the covenant at the September test.
Collections effort concentrates on the slow-paying account ahead of week nine, and the sponsor is briefed on the September test with ten weeks of notice rather than ten days.
Nothing here required new capital or a heroic quarter. The value was in seeing two things earlier: a definition in the credit agreement made the covenant tighter than the company believed, and one week of the forecast contained a collision the monthly view could not show.
Common questions
What is a 13-week cash flow forecast?
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A 13-week cash flow forecast is a weekly, direct-method projection of cash receipts and disbursements over the next quarter. Unlike the indirect cash flow statement in your financials, it starts from bank activity rather than net income, so it answers a different question: not whether the business was profitable, but whether there is cash in the account on a given Friday.
Why 13 weeks rather than a monthly forecast?
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Thirteen weeks is one quarter, which matches most covenant test dates and most sponsor reporting cycles. Weekly granularity matters because cash problems are timing problems: a month that nets positive can still contain a week where payroll and a debt service payment land before a large receivable clears. A monthly view hides exactly the week that hurts.
How is the forecast kept accurate over time?
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Each week the prior week's actuals are entered alongside what was forecast, and the variance is reviewed line by line. That comparison is the mechanism that makes the model better — collection timing assumptions get calibrated against what customers actually did, rather than against what the AR ageing implied they would do.
Do you work with our existing accounting system?
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Yes. The forecast pulls from whatever you already run — QuickBooks, NetSuite, Sage, or an ERP — using the AR ageing, AP ageing, and bank activity. No system migration is required, and no new software is introduced. The model is an Excel workbook that reads exports from your system.
What happens if we are heading toward a covenant breach?
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You find out with time to act, which is the entire point of forecasting covenant ratios forward rather than calculating them after the fact. A projected breach that is visible eight weeks out is a conversation with your lender about an amendment or a waiver. The same breach discovered on the test date is a default.
Who prepares the compliance certificate?
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I prepare it, calculated to the definitions in your credit agreement rather than to generic formulas, and hand it over ready for signature. Credit agreements define EBITDA, fixed charges, and permitted add-backs differently from one another, and a certificate built on the wrong definition is wrong even when the arithmetic is right.
How much of our team's time does this take each week?
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After the build, typically under an hour. The weekly update needs an AR and AP export, the bank balance, and a short conversation about anything unusual coming — a large customer payment expected, a capital purchase, a bonus run. The rest is on me.
Can we run the model ourselves later?
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That is the intent. The workbook is documented, the assumptions sit in one clearly labelled input tab rather than hardcoded inside formulas, and the weekly routine is written down. Several engagements move to a lighter review role once a controller is comfortably running the update.
Related work
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