As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly create a 12-month financial forecast for your business.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 1 hour until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open your accounting system and bank records, then gather monthly revenue, expenses, bank cash, unpaid invoices, unpaid bills, payroll, VAT, tax, debt and capital spending figures.
   2. Open a spreadsheet and create separate tabs for source data, assumptions, monthly profit and loss, cash flow, and scenarios.
   3. Paste the gathered figures and the assumptions you can defend into the prompt, leaving unknown items explicitly marked as missing rather than estimating them.
   4. Run the prompt in a chatbot or spreadsheet AI tool and export the resulting tables and formulas into the forecast workbook.
   5. Compare every historical total in the draft with your accounting reports, bank statements and payroll or VAT records, then correct the source data before changing any forecast assumption.
   6. Test the base, cautious and strong cases by changing the named revenue, cost and cash assumptions, and check that the formulas update the monthly profit and closing cash correctly.
   7. Send the completed workbook and its assumptions list to your accountant before using it for borrowing, investment, hiring or a major spending decision.

   Prompt

   Create a 12-month financial forecast for my UK business using only the information below. Do not invent figures, dates, transactions or assumptions. If information is missing, list it clearly and leave the relevant cell blank or mark it as an assumption requiring confirmation.
   
   Business type and accounting basis: [describe the business and whether figures are cash or accrual based]
   Forecast start date: 2026-08-13
   Historical monthly revenue and costs: [paste figures or attach a spreadsheet]
   Opening bank cash and unpaid invoices or bills: [provide figures]
   Revenue drivers, prices, volumes, customers and expected changes: [provide assumptions]
   Variable costs and supplier terms: [provide assumptions]
   Fixed costs: [provide monthly or annual figures]
   Payroll, employer costs and planned hires: [provide figures and plans]
   VAT registration and expected VAT treatment: [provide confirmed details]
   Corporation Tax or other tax provisions: [provide confirmed figures or state that an accountant will supply them]
   Debt repayments, finance and interest: [provide figures]
   Planned equipment, property or other capital spending: [provide figures]
   Owner drawings, dividends or other transfers: [provide figures]
   One-off items and known risks: [provide details]
   
   Produce:
   1. A month-by-month revenue, cost and operating profit forecast.
   2. A cash-flow forecast showing opening cash, receipts, payments and closing cash.
   3. A list of all assumptions, with each assumption linked to the figures it changes.
   4. A base case, cautious case and strong case, changing only assumptions that I can identify and approve.
   5. A break-even analysis and the months in which cash falls below the opening level.
   6. A reconciliation showing that each total is calculated from the monthly lines.
   7. Spreadsheet-ready tables and formulas where possible.
   
   Separate actual historical figures from estimates. Flag any VAT, payroll, tax, accounting or legal point that needs confirmation by my accountant. Do not present this as professional advice. After the forecast, give me a short list of the source figures and assumptions I must check before using it for a lender, investor or major business decision.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.