Cash flow app: Which of these 10 will forecast your business health in 2025?
Cash flow control is vital for small businesses. Discover top cash flow apps to forecast and manage your finances seamlessly on desktop or mobile.
Cash flow is the lifeblood of small businesses, and understanding what cash flow is in business is essential to managing it well. How you manage it is often the difference between successfully building your business or closing it entirely. Over the years, I’ve spoken to many accountants and bookkeepers who have seen profitable small businesses get into financial trouble because of poor cash management. This list of some of the best cash flow apps for small businesses will help you avoid the same mistakes by predicting your cash flow and ensuring you can manage cash flow in a small business with ease.
Cash flow tools let you see the impact of how, and more importantly when, the bills you are paying will impact the cash balance in your checking account. You’ll also be able to simulate the effect of different payment terms or possible financing options. Using tools like these will allow you to literally see into the future and create an optimized plan to keep your business running safely and smoothly.
The benefits of using cash flow forecasting apps
Some people do personal cash forecasting with credit cards, reviewing their previous spending across categories to predict what their future expenses will look like. But cash flow apps for business take it to the next level with automation, insights, and smart cash hacks to improve your financial health.
The best apps let you automate cash flow forecasting (on mobile and desktop) so you can manage your cash better and plan efficient business growth wherever works best for you. Some of the ways they help you do that include:
Tracking your spending
The most basic thing any financial operation, like a business, needs to do is to track expenses. But as a business owner, you’re stretched in a million directions—tending to customers, employees, suppliers—and it’s easy to accidentally drop the ball on this one.
However, even if you think you pretty much know what you’re spending, actually writing down and categorizing every dollar, gives you the true picture of where you stand. It tells you whether you’re spending money the way you’d want to, or in a way that keeps you from growing the way you know you could.
By regularly monitoring your finances, you can develop stronger cash flow management strategies that support growth and reduce risk.
Identifying cash flow shortages
When you regularly track your expenses vs. your revenue, it makes it easy to identify where cash flow can get tight, or even negative cash flow, to avoid a potential cash flow emergency. Knowing how much cash a small business should have in the bank is part of planning for the unexpected and building long-term resilience.
A great cash flow app for small business will sync to QuickBooks Online (or the accounting and bookkeeping software you prefer) to pull in your historical data. Then you can put in your expected revenues, payroll, and upcoming expenses (aka bills that you have to pay).
Then you can accurately identify trends and causes, project the future cash balance of your checking account, and make changes to prevent shortfalls.
Managing surplus cash
A cash surplus is usually a great problem to have—there’s more cash coming into your business than heading out the door. Just remember, understanding cash flow vs profit is key—extra cash doesn’t always mean higher profit.
What you do with this surplus is what matters—do you use it to be more generous with your spending, or are you investing it wisely in growth?
Since cash flow apps give you a deep, practical understanding of your business, they can help you make strategic, data-based choices that will serve you better in the long term by teaching you how to manage business money wisely.
Predicting seasonality
Many businesses experience seasonal peaks, such as:
- Winter for winter sport and travel businesses.
- Black Friday or the holiday season for retail businesses.
- Tax season for financial businesses.
But there could be less obvious seasonal patterns at play in your business. If you run an arts and crafts business, for example, maybe you’ll find there are more sales when it’s very hot or cold outside as people spend more time indoors.
As a small business owner, your seasonality might have a personal angle too. If you run a computer store, and you’re a skier yourself and want to close shop for a bit every winter to enjoy that, or if you take a month off every summer to be with your kids, that’s possible with advanced planning. But there could be financial implications to these patterns—unless you plan for them and take action ahead of time.
Predicting seasonality in your business can help you understand when you need to up your revenue generation game, how to increase cash flow, and how to manage your finances to keep your business thriving through the slow seasons as well.
Top 10 cash flow forecasting apps to boost your business finances
Let’s explore some great forecasting apps, including how they help you predict and manage your finances, and how much they cost.
1. CashFlowTool
Price: $42 a month
CashFlowTool automatically syncs with QuickBooks (online or desktop) and instantly builds a 6-month future cash flow forecast.
You can see all your future inflows and outflows, see your cash flow by day, week and month and perform what-if scenarios (hiring, new equipment, etc) to quickly see the impact on future cash flow.
CashFlowTool also has a built-in anomaly detector to watch over your business, analyze your cash details, and alert you to unexpected changes (unusual bills, cash shortages, etc). KPI dashboards show your top business metrics and of course, you can share and export your forecast into Excel.
2. Cash Flow Frog
Price: Starting at $31 a month
Cash Flow Frog takes cash flow planning off your already-full plate. It integrates with your company’s QuickBooks data (as well as Xero, FreshBooks, and Sage), and it is always up-to-date. Use Cash Flow Frog to plan ahead, and never get stuck with salaries or accounts payable you can’t pay. Generate reports to your investors, collect accounts receivable more easily, and take a big step ahead towards a financially greener future.
3. Float
Price: Starting at $50 a month
Float provides a quick and easy solution to cash flow forecasting. Gone are the days of spending hours every month trying to update your spreadsheet only for it to go out of date the next time you process a transaction.
As Float automatically reads all of your bills, invoices, and actuals in QBO, Xero, or FreeAgent, it provides you with an up-to-date, accurate cash flow forecast in a matter of minutes.
4. Live Plan
Price: Starting at $20 a month
LivePlan is a powerful profit and cash forecasting tool, equipped with industry benchmarks and the ability to run multiple financial scenarios all wrapped into a concise, visual dashboard that syncs with your accounting data (QuickBooks or Xero).
Understand your cash flow, collaborate with your management team, report to stakeholders, and help everyone understand the story behind the numbers.
Take control of the planning, pitching and management process, and never be surprised by your numbers again with LivePlan.
5. Spotlight reporting
Price: Starting at $35 a month
Spotlight Reporting was designed by accountants. It’s built for both accountants and businesses wanting reporting that delivers deeper insight and clarity for better decision making.
It helps you produce budgets and forecasts, test out what-if scenarios, compare your data to industry benchmarks, enjoy comprehensive dashboards, get visual reports (including types of financial statements, customizable environmental, social and governance report templates). You can integrate your accounting data with non-financial data to gain a fuller picture of your business.
6. Helm
Price: Starting at $32 a month
Helm makes cash management and forecasting easier, faster, and more intuitive.
Helm automatically creates dynamic, forward-looking cash forecasts based on receivable and payable predictions. Revenue and expense information is automatically populated by syncing with QBO, Xero, and Sage Accounting. And with a highly intuitive interface, all of Helm’s automated logic can be quickly and easily manipulated to your needs.
7. Fathom
Price: Starting at $53 a month
Fathom is a financial analysis and management reporting tool that helps you to assess business performance, monitor trends, and identify improvement opportunities.
Fathom helps you boost efficiency and easily measure and monitor the financial metrics that matter most. Whether you call it business intelligence, performance management, or analytics, the goal of Fathom is to help you understand what’s happening in your business and how to take action when needed.
8. Dryrun
Price: Contact sales for a quote.
Manage cash, model ‘what if’ scenarios, and forecast sales with this simple-to-use but powerful tool built for business owners and their advisors.
Flexible & scenario-based, Dryrun helps compare scenarios to avoid risk and grow. Import invoices, bills, transfers, deposits, POs and estimates, purchases, customer, due date, amount, and bank balance.
9. Futrli
Price: Starting at $40 a month + taxes
Futrli aims to help businesses, bookkeepers and accountants understand what’s happening in their business or clients’ current bank balance, what happened in these financial assets in the past, what they can expect ahead, and how to gain better control of their businesses, so they can increase their profitability.
Using this app, you get real time cash flow forecasting, alongside actionable insights, customizable reports, and visuals that let youtest what-if scenarios.
It works backwards, too, helping you understand how your profit impacts your cash flow and future business value.
10. Microsoft Excel
Price: Starting at $7.20 a month per user
Powered by Microsoft’s AI-based Copilot, Excel lets you build your very own custom cash flow forecast or use one of the existing templates. Just search for “cash flow” in Excel to find them. Alternatively, if you use the Excel app to take a photo of a printed data table, it will automatically turn it into a fully editable one.
Copilot also helps you analyze your data and what-if scenarios, discover trends and get ideas for improvement through a compelling, visualized dashboard that’s easy to read. It makes it easy to collaborate on desktop, mobile and online, and to connect to BI data sources.
Choosing the right cash flow forecasting app for your business
Having a good reading of your cash flow can reduce a lot of stress you feel as a small business owner, and allow you to focus on other important aspects of growing your company.
But which factors should you consider when trying to maximize your cash flow and choose the right cash flow management app for your company?
- Make sure it’s easy to use, from anywhere you want to use it. There are plenty of options for an online, desktop and mobile app for cash flow forecasting in one place, so don’t settle for one that doesn’t meet your needs..
- The combined ability to see real-time data alongside anomalies and predictive insights is essential.
- Verify you’re able to run and compare what-if scenarios to understand the impact hiring a new employee or adding software to your tech stack would have on your future cash flow
- Analytics that give you the data you need to support financial decisions like planningexpense timelines to support positive cash flow are useful to have.
- Connecting data from various departments (finance, HR, etc), plus collaborating with approved stakeholders and partners like employees and external accountants (and choosing who has access to what) can amplify what you’re able to deliver.
- Not every app offers industry benchmarks, but if you get one that does, it’s definitely a plus.
Plus, check out its integrations for amplifying cash flow further. For example, pairing your optimized cash flow plan with Melio will help you turn that plan into action. In Melio, you can schedule business payments to match your cash flow planning so you’re always in control.
Melio lets you pay some bills by credit card, allowing you to set your own terms and possibly add up to 45 days of additional credit card float. This flexibility helps you smooth cash flow fluctuations in your checking account.
See how other businesses like yours are thriving with Melio, and start now for free to see what’s possible for you, too.
*This blog post is intended for informational purposes only and is not intended as financial advice.
**Melio does not provide legal, tax or accounting advice, and you should consult with a professional advisor before making any financial decisions.
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