What is the cashflow forecast?

The cashflow forecast projects an operating-cash proxy three months ahead: each month's contribution margin, minus that month's ad spend, minus refunds paid out. It is not a bank-account model — no opex, no VAT remittance, no payment-provider settlement lags — but it tracks the three largest operational flows, and unlike the revenue forecast it is allowed to go negative.

Formula

monthly value = contribution margin − ad spend − refunds
forecast      = trend(last 12 months), projected 3 months, NOT floored at zero

Worked example

A store's monthly series runs +€9,000 to +€14,000 through autumn, then Q4 ad scaling pushes spend up faster than margin: December reads −€2,000. The projection carries that slope forward to roughly −€5,000 by February. Whether that is alarming depends on why — planned acquisition investment reads very differently from drift — but the widget's job is to make the slope visible while there is still a quarter to react.

How Saldo Metrics computes it

Three monthly series are combined: contribution margin summed from v_contribution_margin (net sales only, EUR), ad spend from v_blended_roas_monthly (the fact_ad_spend basis, all channels), and refunds from v_refund_detail — filtered to refunds on orders that still count as sales. That filter is load-bearing: a fully refunded order contributes no margin at all, so subtracting its refund too would book the outflow without the matching inflow. (The unrecovered COGS on such orders is a residual the proxy deliberately does not model.) The combined series is projected with the same selectable methods as the other forecasts, and negative projections are shown as-is — a warning is the point.

Why it matters

Profitable-on-paper stores die of cash timing. This proxy strips the question to its operating core: does a month's margin cover what marketing and refunds take out of it? A declining slope here, months ahead of the bank balance feeling it, is the cheapest early warning the data can give.

Common mistakes

• Reading it as a bank-balance forecast. Opex, VAT, inventory purchases and settlement delays are all outside it; the P&L widget carries the opex side.
• Ignoring the ad-spend basis. Spend here comes from the channel-level spend facts, matching blended ROAS — not the creative-level performance rows, which can differ slightly in coverage.
• Panicking at one negative month. A planned campaign push makes single months negative by design; the projected slope is the signal, not one bar.

Where you see this in the app

The Cashflow Forecast dashboard widget, with the projection method selectable per widget.