Your first forecast
Once the initial Xero sync finishes, the Cash Runway dashboard lights up with your first 13-week forecast. This page walks you through what you're looking at.
The starting cash figure
Top-left of the dashboard, in large type, is your starting cash. It is the sum of the reconciled balances across every active bank account Cash Runway found in Xero, as of the most recent reconciled transaction.
Two things to note:
- Reconciled only. Unreconciled bank feed lines are excluded by default — they represent money that is not yet confirmed, so counting them would inflate the starting point.
- As-of date. The timestamp next to the figure tells you when that balance was last reconciled. If it's more than a few days old, that's usually a prompt to go reconcile in Xero rather than a Cash Runway issue.
The 13-week timeline
Below starting cash, the timeline is the hero view. It's a grid of 13 weekly columns, starting from the current week, with rows grouped into the categories Cash Runway tracks:
- Opening cash — what you start each week with (always the previous week's closing).
- Inflows — customer receipts (AR due that week), other income, manual inflow items.
- Outflows — bills due (AP), payroll estimates, recurring costs, manual outflow items.
- Net change — inflows minus outflows.
- Closing cash — opening + net change, carried into the next week as opening.
A line chart above the table plots closing cash across the 13 weeks, with a confidence band wrapping the central line. Weeks where closing cash dips below zero are flagged with a red banner above the chart and a highlighted column in the grid.
Click a cell to drill in
Any amount cell in the timeline is clickable. A side drawer opens with the individual line items (invoices, bills, manual items) that rolled up into that figure — useful when a week looks unexpectedly high or low.
The three default scenarios
Cash Runway ships three scenarios out of the box, and you switch between them with the tabs above the timeline:
| Scenario | What it assumes |
|---|---|
| Base | Invoices are paid on their due dates; bills are paid on time. |
| Best | Invoices are paid ~7 days early; no late payers. |
| Worst | Invoices slip by their customer's typical payment-lag; late AR is treated as collections-risk. |
Under the hood, each scenario is a set of assumptions applied on top of the same underlying data. You can edit those assumptions — or add entirely new scenarios — from the Scenarios guide.
What to do next
You now have a working 13-week forecast. The natural next moves:
- Read the dashboard — the 5-tile KPI strip, the cash-runway chart, and the daily AI brief that calls out the week's main driver, biggest risk, and one recommended action.
- Add manual items for things not in Xero yet (a known tax payment, a pending grant, an owner draw).
- Tweak the scenarios to match how your customers actually pay.
- Import historical data via CSV if you keep some categories outside Xero.
From here, the feature guides are the best place to go.