Cash flow dashboard for mid-sized companies: what belongs in it

A useful cash flow dashboard for a mid-sized company has five layers: a live cash position across all accounts as of today, a 13-week cash flow forecast, the trend of DSO, DPO, and the cash conversion cycle, receivables aging past due, and a scenario view (base, optimistic, crisis). The monthly closing arrives late: in 2023, EU companies collected invoices from their customers on average only after 61.8 days¹. Liquidity cannot be managed with a two-month lag. The dashboard must show where the cash actually is and where it is heading over the coming weeks, not where it was last quarter.

Why monthly accounting reports are not enough to manage liquidity

The income statement for the past month is accurate, but old. By the time the accountant closes it, reviews it, and comments on it, it is usually the middle of the next month. That means you are deciding about your cash based on data that is four to six weeks old. For a company with revenue of CZK 50 to 500 million, where a single invoice can represent several million, that is an unacceptable lag.

The reality of payments makes it worse. According to the EU Payment Observatory, in 2023 EU companies were paid by other companies on average only after 61.8 days, more than five days later than in 2022¹. The share of businesses facing difficulties due to late payments rose from 43% to 47%, the largest year-on-year increase in five years¹. In other words: the money is not where the income statement shows it as revenue. It is still with the customer. Accounting profit and cash in the bank diverge precisely at the moment you need to know whether you will pay wages and VAT.

The cash flow dashboard fills this gap. It does not replace accounting; it reads data from it and adds a forward-looking view. A good dashboard answers three questions a monthly report cannot: how much money do I have right now, how much will I have in 13 weeks, and what happens if two key customers pay late.

Layer 1: a live cash position across accounts

The foundation is a single number you trust: how much free cash the company has this morning. For a mid-sized company, that means adding up the balances of all current accounts, overdrafts, foreign-currency accounts, and short-term deposits, ideally automatically via a banking API rather than by manually copying figures from online banking.

A connection via a banking API (PSD2) lets you pull balances and movements every day without manual work. That is the difference between a dashboard that is current and a spreadsheet that someone updates „when they get to it“. How to set up such a connection in practice is covered in our piece on the banking API. Always state the cash position in net terms: available cash minus payables due this week, so the number does not lie through optimism.

Layer 2: the 13-week cash flow forecast

The thirteen-week forecast (roughly one quarter broken down by week) is a standard treasury tool and the most important one for managing liquidity. It shows expected inflows and outflows week by week and reveals the specific week when there is a risk of falling below a safe threshold. The annual budget tells you the year will be profitable. The thirteen-week forecast tells you that in week seven you will not have enough to cover an advance invoice to a supplier.

The forecast should include confirmed receivables based on real rather than contractual due dates, planned wage payments, levies, VAT, loan and lease repayments, and larger one-off expenses. The strength of the tool lies in the weekly update and the comparison of plan against actuals: each week you see where the forecast was wrong, and the model becomes more accurate. We cover the mechanics of building it separately in the article on the 13-week forecast.

Layer 3: the trend of DSO, DPO, and the cash conversion cycle

Three working capital metrics say more than dozens of lines of the income statement. DSO (the average collection period for receivables) shows how quickly revenue turns into cash. DPO (the payment period for payables) shows how long you hold on to suppliers' money. The difference between them plus the inventory turnover period make up the cash conversion cycle (CCC), the number of days a company finances its own operations out of its own pocket before the money comes back.

That this is not a local problem is borne out by global data. According to the PwC Working Capital Study, global DSO rose over the past decade from 47.3 days in 2015 to 50.0 days in 2024². For a company with revenue of CZK 200 million, each additional day of DSO means roughly CZK 550 thousand more tied up in receivables. The dashboard should therefore show these metrics as a trend over the last 12 months, not as a single number. Falling DSO means improvement; rising DSO without revenue growth is an early warning that receivables are piling up. How to calculate and interpret DSO is explained in the article on DSO.

Layer 4: receivables aging (AR aging)

The receivables aging table splits all open invoices into bands: not yet due, 1 to 30 days past due, 31 to 60, 61 to 90, and more than 90 days. This is the layer that a monthly report typically does not show in real time, yet this is exactly where a future cash problem is born.

For a mid-sized company, all it takes is for three large customers to fall into the „60 days past due“ band and the thirteen-week forecast falls apart. Besides the bands, the dashboard should therefore show concentration: what percentage of past-due receivables falls on the five largest debtors. If a single customer holds 30% of your past-due receivables, that is not an accounting detail but a risk that belongs on the owner's desk before it turns into an uncollectible receivable. The aging table is at the same time a working list for follow-up: it shows who to call today, not at the end of the month.

Layer 5: the scenario view

The final layer turns the dashboard from a report into a decision-making tool. Instead of a single outlook, it shows at least three: base (payments arrive according to real history), optimistic (everything per contractual due dates), and crisis (key customers pay 30 days later, or the loss of the largest client).

The point of scenarios is not to predict the future but to show sensitivity. When in the crisis scenario you drop below zero as early as week five, you know in advance that you need to either speed up collection, negotiate longer terms with suppliers, or activate the overdraft. This decision, made calmly six weeks ahead, is an order of magnitude cheaper than the same decision under pressure on the day wages are due. This is exactly where data becomes management.

What a good dashboard looks like in practice

A good cash flow dashboard fits on a single screen, updates daily for cash and weekly for the forecast and aging table, and every number is clickable down to specific invoices. It does not need dozens of charts. It needs the five layers above and a clearly marked cash safety threshold below which the company must not fall.

From our practice, the most common mistake a mid-sized company makes is having excellent accounting and no forward-looking view. The data is in the system; it is just that no one combines it into a single daily picture. Building such a dashboard is not a question of expensive new software but of correctly connecting bank data, receivables, and a few operating assumptions. Once it is in place, the owner sees the company's liquidity for the first time the way a finance director sees it: not in hindsight, but ahead.