CFO: plan for May and for January

Every shop owner knows the shape of the year. April to August the bench is booked out a week, the pre-season orders are arriving, and cash looks fine. Then November comes, service drops by half, the distributor bills for the spring pre-order land, and payroll does not care what month it is.

The CFO module is built for that conversation. It gives you a cash-flow forecast by week or by month, built from what you expect to collect, what you have to pay, debt service and the assumptions you set for payroll, taxes, equipment and owner draws. It highlights the week cash dips below the minimum you set, before you get there.

It is designed with an outside professional in mind as well. CFO is built so a fractional CFO, bookkeeper or accountant can work in the same space as the owner, and AI suggestions are drafts until a person accepts them.

The useful questions are specific. What happens to cash in February if spring pre-orders are twenty percent bigger than last year? What if the wet April people remember happens again and service volume slips a month? What if you hire a second mechanic in March instead of May?

CFO keeps each of those as a scenario next to the base case: the upside, the downside and a stress case that asks what breaks first. You can compare them in one view and see which week cash goes below your floor in each. Budgets work the same way: build the year, lock an approved baseline, reforecast in June, and see actuals against both.

One limit to know: the forecast does not yet learn seasonality from your history. You set the assumptions, and for a bike shop that means putting the seasonal curve in yourself, month by month. For most owners that is a twenty-minute job with the numbers from last year open beside it.

The Service plan leaves consolidated reporting and planning to CFO, and bench-level reports such as throughput, comebacks and technician time to Service itself. Service already tracks technician time and booked visits, and its monthly report shows what was invoiced, collected and outstanding. Those are the numbers that make a forecast sharper: a full bench in the second half of April is cash on the way. A feed from Service into CFO is not built yet, and parts are not tracked in Service at all.

Today, CFO works from the books it holds and connects to QuickBooks Online through its accounting adapter. A direct feed from erp.io Accounting is not something we will promise here; check with us before you rely on it.

If you have a lender, a partner or an accountant asking how the year looks, CFO is where you answer with a forecast rather than a feeling.