Here at Float, we know that your cash flow doesn’t always run like clockwork. Money moves in and out of your business all the time and, sometimes, a single monthly budget amount just isn’t accurate enough.
That’s why we’ve made forecasting in Float more flexible and accurate than ever with Multi-budgets. In a nutshell, Multi-budgets will allow you to create multiple individual budgets within each category in Float.
Multi-budgets in action
Imagine you’re Alison. Alison runs a digital agency that builds apps and websites for others, and uses Float to keep on top of her cash flow. Alison’s advertising cash budget is made up of a number of different things – Facebook ads, Twitter ads, and Google search ads, all with different costs and different payment schedules. A single monthly budget just doesn’t provide enough accuracy for Alison.
Today, she has to add up all the expected payments for each month and enter the total into Float. She uses the Notes feature to capture a more detailed breakdown. With Multi-budgets, Alison can create individual cash budget amounts for Facebook, Twitter and Google ad spend, set a payment schedule for each, and the cash flow graph will show when these individual payments are made within the month. Pretty handy, right?
You spoke, we listened
When we spoke to users about what would help solve the difficulties they were having with their cash flow forecasts, the ability to create multiple cash budgets under each category was important to a lot of people. Most folks tend not to think about their forecasts in terms of general ledger categories – they think in terms of where the cash is either coming from or going to!
After some initial user interviews, Jamie (our UX Designer) designed some simple prototypes and tested them with Float users in order to get feedback, and make sure that it solved this problem for them. Based on the feedback from these sessions, we were able to keep improving and re-testing the solution.
How to get started with Multi-budgets
Getting started with Multi-budgets is super easy. All your existing cash budgets will still be available in Float, but if you want to delete a single monthly budget and replace it with Multi-budgets, just click on that existing budget, and click the ‘trash can’ button to delete it.
Once you’ve done that, click ‘Create budget’, which will open the ‘Creating a new budget’ screen. From here you add the details of the budget you want to create. Lather, rinse and repeat for each budget you want to create. Simple!
If you want to update a scenario, you can also use multi-budgets to get even more detailed about those ‘what-if’ questions like, what if I increase my Twitter advertising budget? Simply add budgets in the same way as above, and those budgets will ‘stack’ on top of any budgets already created in your Base scenario.
We’d love to hear from you if you’ve got any feedback or questions about Multi-budgets in Float – we’re available via the chat icon in the bottom right corner of the app, or via support@floatapp.com. We want to make sure it’s helping you get the most accurate cash flow forecast possible, and enables you to make business decisions with confidence.
Sign up for a free 14-day trial of Float today and see for yourself just what Multi-budgets can do for you!