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Cash flow 101: How to keep your business running smoothly

By CashSheet Team · · 6 min read
Cash flow 101: How to keep your business running smoothly

Cash flow is not profit

A profitable business can still run out of cash. If your customers pay in 60 days but your suppliers demand payment in 30, you have a cash flow gap — even if your income statement looks great.

The three types of cash flow

Operating cash flow comes from your core business activities. Investing cash flow relates to buying or selling assets. Financing cash flow covers loans, equity, and dividends. Together, they paint the complete picture.

Build a 13-week forecast

A rolling 13-week cash flow forecast is the most practical tool for small businesses. List every expected cash inflow and outflow week by week. Update it every Monday. It takes 30 minutes and can save your business.

82% of small businesses that fail cite cash flow problems as a contributing factor.

Improve your cash position

Invoice immediately. Offer early payment discounts. Negotiate longer payment terms with suppliers. Build a cash reserve of at least 3 months of operating expenses. These aren't just best practices — they're survival strategies.

Frequently Asked Questions

Quick answers about the three-product platform — CashSheet, MakeSheet, and CashSheet AI.

CashSheet is a cloud-native operations platform with three products on one foundation: CashSheet for double-entry accounting and sales orders, MakeSheet for LP-based production planning, and CashSheet AI for commodity contract management. Every customer gets a dedicated silo with complete tenant isolation.

CashSheet handles the books — chart of accounts, journal entries, invoices, bills, sales orders, financial reports. MakeSheet is the production-planning engine: it solves a linear program against your orders, yields, and capacity to recommend today's fab mix. CashSheet AI manages commodity supply contracts, indexed pricing, and basis exposures. You can run any one of them on its own, or all three on the same silo.

MakeSheet is built for protein and food processors — beef, pork, poultry, seafood, dairy. Anywhere a raw input is broken down into many sellable products through a yield matrix, where the question every shift is "what should we make today given today's orders, prices, and what's in the cooler?" Wagyu fabricators, beef harvest plants, further-processing facilities, and meal-kit operations are all good fits.

Given your open orders, raw material on hand, yield matrices, market prices, and shift/grind/drop limits, the solver finds the production mix that maximizes contribution margin — typically across thousands of variables and hundreds of constraints. A typical solve runs in under 100 ms. The same engine powers Check Availability in sales-order entry: it tells you whether a new order can be promised before the rep hits send.

Yes. Each tenant can register multiple facilities (plants, freezers, warehouses, distribution centers). The LP solver runs per facility, so each plant gets its own production plan, but financial reporting rolls up at the entity level. Cross-facility inventory transfers are first-class — what one plant ships, the receiving plant sees as availability.

Every customer runs in their own silo: a dedicated Postgres database, dedicated application containers, and a dedicated subdomain (e.g. yourname.cashsheet.com). There is no shared multi-tenant database table where one bug could leak rows between customers. The boundary is enforced at the infrastructure layer, not in application code.

CashSheet is built on a full double-entry accounting engine with chart of accounts, journal entries, ledgers, balance sheets, income statements, and cash-flow statements — compatible with GAAP and IFRS reporting principles. Every sales order, bill, and inventory movement posts proper journal entries automatically.

Yes. CashSheet imports OFX and QFX bank statements directly, and accepts CSV for customers, vendors, items, sales orders, and most other entities. Direct connectors to QuickBooks Online, Xero, and major ERPs are handled during onboarding rather than self-serve — that way the migration is supervised end-to-end and your opening balances land correctly.

We host the silo for you on cloud infrastructure (default), or deploy into your own cloud account or on-prem if compliance requires it. Typical onboarding for a single-facility tenant is two to three weeks: provision the silo, load chart of accounts and master data, configure the yield matrix and capacity limits if you're using MakeSheet, and run a parallel period before cut-over.

Pricing scales with which products you use (CashSheet, MakeSheet, CashSheet AI), how many facilities you run, and the size of your operation. There's no published per-seat tier because the spread between a one-plant fabricator and a five-plant operation is too wide for that to be honest. Send us a note and we'll quote you in a day or two.

Yes. Every customer gets email support and access to documentation. MakeSheet customers also get direct access to the engineers who built the solver — when a plan looks wrong, we want to see it, not triage it through a ticket queue.

Reach out via the contact form below or email [email protected]. We'll set up a 30-minute call to understand your operation and show you a demo silo running on data shaped like yours.

Run your plant, not a spreadsheet.

MakeSheet plans the day. CashSheet posts the entries.

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