As of 13 August 2026, AI can create a cash flow forecast for your UK business.

What to actually do

1. Use a tool built for this

   The route this page recommends

2. Do it yourself

   Second choice

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

   How to actually do it

   1. Open a spreadsheet and create a folder containing your latest business bank statements, sales invoices, purchase bills, payroll totals, VAT or tax payment information and planned large payments.
   2. Record the opening bank balance and the date it applies to, then list each expected receipt and payment with its amount, category and expected payment date.
   3. Mark each figure as confirmed, estimated or unknown, and write down the assumptions for customer payment timing, sales growth, supplier timing, payroll, tax, VAT and one-off spending.
   4. Paste the collected data and the copyable prompt into an AI tool, asking it to return the forecast as a spreadsheet-ready table with base, downside and upside scenarios.
   5. Paste the returned table into your spreadsheet and compare every receipt, payment, date and opening balance against the source documents you gathered.
   6. Recalculate the running balance in the spreadsheet, check that each closing balance follows the stated formula, and replace unsupported estimates before using the forecast to plan payments or funding.

   Prompt

   Create a monthly cash flow forecast for my UK business from [start date] to [end date]. Use only the data I provide and do not invent figures, dates, customers, suppliers or assumptions. Show a table with opening cash, cash received by category, cash paid by category, net cash flow and closing cash for each month. Include VAT, PAYE, corporation tax or Self Assessment payments only where I provide the amount and payment date. Separate confirmed figures from estimates, flag missing inputs, and identify the first month in which the closing balance falls below [minimum cash buffer]. Produce three scenarios: base case, downside case and upside case, changing only the assumptions I specify. Add a short list of every assumption and a check that each month’s closing cash equals opening cash plus receipts minus payments. Use pounds sterling and UK date formats. Here is the business information and source data: [paste opening bank balance, bank transactions, sales invoices and expected payment dates, purchase bills and payment dates, payroll, tax and VAT information, regular costs, one-off costs, funding, planned purchases, seasonality and scenario assumptions].

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

3. Hand it to a person

   The distant third

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