One of the first and most important things to do in Float is to set some budgets for cash you expect to come into and out of your business. Once you do this, you’ll be able to see your future cash, which will be updated every day with what’s really happening in your business.
When you first signed in, you might have had Float predict a base-line forecast for you (taking an average of the last 3 months), or you might have wanted to create it yourself.
To update any existing forecasts, or create new ones, just go to the ‘Cash Flow’ tab, scroll down to this table and click into the cell for the account and month you want to edit. Click on existing forecasts to update them individually or in bulk, or click ‘Create Budget’. When creating a new forecast, you need to fill in:
Budget name
How frequently the budget occurs
When the budget starts
When it ends
Whether it is a fixed amount, increasing or decreasing, and whether it increases or decreases by a set value or by a percentage
You can create budgets as lump sums each month - for instance your rent will probably be a one off-budget per month. However, for things like Sales, you’ll likely have a few different transactions every month. You might want to group these into daily or weekly budgets, by client name, by project, or just pop in one lump sum per month for sales.
The crucial thing to understand is that budgets act like empty placeholders that fill up with paid transactions, and upcoming invoices and bills. So when you budget for a future month and an invoice comes in towards that, it won’t double count. It will simply fill up a portion of the progress bar.