eTopical Precious Finds
Cash flow forecasting tools built for service businesses handle inventory badly, because a service business does not write a $90,000 check three months before the revenue arrives. Five tools are worth a look if you carry stock. One of them models inventory purchase orders directly. Two of them do proper 13-week weekly forecasting. None of them does both, and that gap is the real finding here.
1. Cash Flow Frog
Cash Flow Frog is the only tool on this list that treats an inventory purchase order as a first-class object in the forecast. Its ecommerce page says it directly: add upcoming inventory POs as planned transactions or scenarios. The worked example on that page follows a direct-to-consumer brand at $150,000 a month placing a $90,000 inventory PO in August, half paid on order and half on shipment in September, and shows the resulting cash trough five months out.
It also models marketplace payout lag as a delay between recorded sales and cash arriving, which is the second-largest timing distortion most sellers have. Integrations cover QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, Xero, Zoho Books, FreshBooks, Sage Intacct, and Plaid.
Pricing runs on a revenue slider. The published list price for the first tier, up to $1M in annual revenue, is $55 a month, with a promotional rate shown below that at the time of writing. A separate Sage Intacct table runs from $199 a month for up to three entities to $599 a month above a hundred entities, with discounts for yearly and two-year terms.
The catch: it forecasts daily and rolling, up to 36 months. There is no 13-week framing anywhere in the product. If your lender or your board expects a standard weekly cash forecast, you are building that view yourself.
2. Float
Float does 13-week cash forecasting on every plan, including the entry tier, and that is its clearest advantage. Eight scenarios are available at every level. Growth and Scale extend the horizon to 36 months; the entry plan stops at 12.
Pricing is $105 a month billed annually or $130 monthly for Essentials, $215 or $265 for Growth, and $315 or $389 for Scale, with additional entities beyond five at $63 or $78 each. Prices exclude VAT. Float positions Essentials for companies below £2M in revenue and Growth above that, which tells you where the product was built.
It connects to Xero and QuickBooks Online only, with Sage Intacct on a waitlist. Float is explicit that it does not connect to your bank directly and retrieves transaction data through the accounting platform instead, syncing every 24 hours.
The catch: there is no inventory or purchase order feature. Float forecasts from invoices, bills, and bank balances. An inventory buy shows up only once it becomes a bill in your accounting system, which for most importers is well after the deposit has already left.
3. Jirav
Jirav is the driver-based option, and it does model inventory, though at the balance sheet level rather than per purchase order. Its help documentation describes two methods: a Days Inventory Outstanding approach that divides monthly inventory COGS by 30 to get daily COGS and applies a days-on-hand assumption, and an Inventory Turnover Ratio approach using COGS divided by average inventory with a trailing average growth driver.
That is genuinely useful for a business planning twelve months out. It is not useful for answering whether Thursday’s wire will clear.
Pricing needs care, because Jirav publishes two very different scales. Accounting and CFO advisory firms see wholesale rates starting at $50 a month for Controller Essentials and $150 for CFO Enterprise. Businesses buying directly see Starter at $10,000 a year and Pro at $15,000 a year, with Enterprise by quote. Starter covers company-level planning, two active plans, 24 months of data, and three dashboards. Pro adds departmental modeling across five departments and 48 months.
The catch: monthly periods only, up to 84 months. No weekly view, and no purchase order object.
4. Fathom
Fathom produces a three-way forecast covering profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow, with driver-based planning and scenario variations on a single main forecast. Its microforecast feature models discrete events like a hire or an asset purchase, which is the closest thing it has to modeling a large stock buy.
Pricing is by company count and monthly only, with no contracts. Starter covers one company at $59 a month, Silver ten companies at $315, Gold twenty-five at $450, and Platinum fifty at $805. Consolidated groups are free and unlimited. Integrations reach further than most on this list: Xero, QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, MYOB, Sage, Excel, Google Sheets, and Access Financials.
The catch, stated by Fathom itself: forecasts use the indirect method, and the product offers monthly, quarterly, or annual cash flow forecasts, not daily or weekly. For an inventory business, that is a hard limit. It also has no inventory or purchase order feature.
5. Cube
Cube is a full financial planning platform rather than a cash tool, and it earns a place here because of one retail workflow: testing merchandise buys against the latest demand forecast before the commitment goes out. Cube frames the problem the way an operator would, noting that inventory buys get committed months before the demand forecast firms up and the gap lands as markdowns.
It reads from NetSuite, Shopify, Microsoft Dynamics 365, ADP, and data warehouses, with the quote form also listing QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, Sage Intacct, and Xero. Seasonal scenario planning runs holiday, promotion, and markdown cases from one set of drivers.
The catch: Cube publishes no prices. Bronze, Silver, and Gold all end in a quote request, and the retail page confirms pricing scales with model size and team. Inventory arrives as a data warehouse feed rather than as native purchase orders, and the platform is read-only by default. There is no 13-week cash forecasting.
The forecast is downstream of the books
Every tool above pulls from your accounting system or a spreadsheet you maintain. If your COGS posts as a lump sum when a supplier invoice hits, rather than per unit as inventory sells, none of these will produce a forecast worth acting on. The same applies to marketplace settlements landing in the ledger as net deposits, which hides fees, refunds, and reserves inside a single number.
That is the fix to make before you buy forecasting software, not after. ConnectBooks published a walkthrough of building the 13-week grid by hand that makes the dependency clear: the starting balance has to be real cash you can draw on, inflows have to be dated when the marketplace disburses rather than when the sale happens, and outflows have to be dated when they clear rather than when the invoice arrives.
Two of those three rules are about timing your own records correctly, which is a bookkeeping question. The IRS recordkeeping guidance puts the standard loosely on purpose, saying you may choose any system suited to your business that clearly shows income and expenses. “Clearly shows” is doing a lot of work in a business where a single Amazon settlement contains a dozen transaction types.
There is also a compliance reason the accrual side matters. Publication 538 states that if you must account for an inventory in your business, you must use an accrual method for your purchases and sales, with an exception for small business taxpayers averaging $26 million or less in gross receipts over the three prior tax years. A forecast built on cash-basis books in an inventory business is forecasting the wrong shape.
How to pick
If the inventory buy is the thing that kills you, start with Cash Flow Frog and accept that you will build the weekly view yourself. If your lender wants a 13-week and your stock purchases are steady and predictable, Float is the cleaner fit. If you are planning a year out with a finance person in the seat, Jirav or Cube. Fathom if reporting across multiple entities matters more than weekly cash.
And if none of them fit, a spreadsheet with thirteen columns and honest dates still beats a well-designed forecast running on numbers nobody has reconciled.
