The case an FD signs fits on one page and shows four things: what the spreadsheet forecast costs the team now, what the software costs over the commitment period, what switching to it and running it will cost in the team's own hours, and which decisions the weekly cash view would change. The value has to outweigh the price and the switching cost together, and the page has to show where each number came from. A case built that way survives the questions an FD asks; a case built on a saved-hours figure nobody can source does not.

This page is for the finance manager or controller who has evaluated a tool and now has to get it approved. It gives the structure of the case, a one-page template to download, where each line's number comes from, and what to write when the answer is not yet. It does not repeat what cash flow forecasting software costs, what a spreadsheet cash forecast costs to maintain or when a built-in planner is enough; it links to each where the case needs its number.

What the finance director is deciding

The objection the case has to answer is a fair one: the value does not yet outweigh the price and the switching and maintenance cost. Every word of that sentence is a line on the case. The price is one line. The switching cost and the ongoing upkeep are two more, and they sit on the cost side, not in a footnote. The value is the set of lines on the other side, and the case is approved when the FD can see the comparison and believes the inputs.

There is no published business-case standard for a company buying a subscription tool. HM Treasury's Green Book, the guidance for spending public money, sets out the five parts of a case (strategic, economic, commercial, financial and management) and is the only formal structure of its kind in the UK; no accountancy body publishes a template for an operational software purchase, and none treats a subscription differently from a capital purchase. The template on this page borrows two disciplines from the Green Book and says so: the shortlist must include what happens if nothing changes, and every benefit needs an owner and a date on which it will be checked.

What kills a case is the same in a 30-person business as in a department. A time-saved figure with no source. A return percentage borrowed from a vendor's calculator. A switching cost that is missing, or that appears only as a reassurance. And no statement of what would have to be true for the spreadsheet to remain the right answer, which is the question an FD asks first, because it is the cheapest option on the table.

The one-page case template

The template is a Word document with twelve lines, each with a prompt for the source of its number. Fill it from the steps in the next section.

Download the one-page business case template (Word, 11 KB)

How to fill in each line

The numbers come from four places: your own model of the current forecast, the vendor's pricing page, your own estimate of the switching and upkeep hours, and the decisions on your forecast in the last quarter. Nothing on the page needs a benchmark, and the lines that most often get one borrowed from somewhere else are the ones that get the case sent back.

Step 1: Write the decision and the do-nothing line first. Line 1 is one sentence. Line 3 is the cost of the forecast the team runs today, and it comes from running the spreadsheet cost model on your own hours and rates: the weekly cycle of gathering balances, refreshing invoices and bills, reviewing expected dates and reconciling to the ledger, plus the rework, the version reconciliation and the cover when the workbook's owner is away. The Green Book's rule for public spending is that the do-nothing option carries its own costs and risks and must be appraised alongside the proposal; the same is true here, and a case that leaves line 3 blank is asking the FD to compare a price with nothing.

Step 2: Take the price from the pricing page and state the commitment. Line 4 is the plan the team would be on, both billing terms, and the total over the period you are asking for. Float's current plans are on our pricing page, and what cash flow forecasting software costs explains the billing terms, currencies and onboarding options behind the figures. Whatever tool the case is for, use the vendor's own page and the date you read it, not a directory. Sunk costs, including the hours already spent evaluating, do not belong on the page.

Step 3: Cost the switching and the upkeep in your own hours. Lines 5 and 6 are the lines the FD's objection is about, and they are filled in, not argued away. No standards body or professional body publishes the components of switching to a subscription tool for a business of this size; the government's whole-life-cost lists for technology procurement name integration, data migration, training, maintenance, support and exit, and those are the categories to price. For a forecasting tool that builds from the ledger, the switching hours are: connecting the accounting platform, checking the first forecast against the spreadsheet line by line, entering the budgets the workbook carried (Float takes pasted values, not a file upload), setting expected dates on open invoices, and showing the team how to read it. The upkeep hours are what remains each week: reviewing expected dates, adjusting budgets, reading the forecast in the cash meeting. Price both at the loaded rates from line 3. One customer's published words on the same split, Marinus Keyser, Group Financial Manager at BLEND: "The setup takes a little effort, but maintenance is less than an hour a week." That is his experience, not a benchmark; the line on your case is your estimate, labelled as one.

Step 4: Write the value lines as decisions, not hours. Line 7 is where cases go wrong. A saved-hours total, even a true one, is a cost-side number in disguise, and the FD will ask what the team did with the hours. The stronger form is the decisions the weekly view would have changed in the last quarter: a hire brought forward or held, a supplier paid early for a discount, a facility drawn a month later, a customer chased before the month turned. Each one has a cash figure attached and a date on which it happened. Where a line does release cash, mark it: the Green Book's distinction is between benefits that change income or expenditure and benefits that do not, and its example of the first kind is an efficiency saving that reduces labour costs. Time saved that does not change what the business spends is real, and it goes on the page, but it is not a cash-releasing line and the FD will read it as one unless you say otherwise.

Step 5: Find the switching value. Line 8 is one calculation and it is the most persuasive line on the page. Start from the value lines and the upkeep hours as you have estimated them, then ask how far each could be wrong before the subscription plus switching plus upkeep exceeds the value. The Green Book asks public-sector appraisers to correct for the proven tendency to overstate benefits, and for operating costs and benefits it recommends sensitivity analysis over any fixed adjustment. Write the answer in one sentence: the case holds unless the value lines are more than a third smaller than estimated, or the upkeep is more than double. An FD who can see that sentence does not need to argue with the estimates.

Step 6: Answer the IT Manager and the accountant before they ask. Line 10 takes the questions the National Cyber Security Centre sets out for assessing a cloud service and answers each from the vendor's own documentation, not the sales deck. Line 11 is one sentence on the accounting treatment, confirmed with your accountant. Both are covered below.

Step 7: Set the review and make the ask. Line 12 names who owns each value line and the date it is checked. The first renewal is the natural date, because it is when the decision is taken again. Line 1 then reads as either an approval or a trial with a decision date, and the trial is the better ask when line 8 is tight: the switching hours get spent once, on real data, and the value lines get tested before any commitment.

What to say about switching and upkeep

The switching cost is where a case earns or loses the FD's trust, because it is the line most often left off. Put it on, in hours, and say what the hours are for.

For a tool that builds the forecast from the ledger there is no data migration in the usual sense. Float reads reconciled balances, open invoices and unpaid bills from Xero or QuickBooks Online through a one-way connection; nothing is keyed in and nothing writes back. The set-up work is checking, not moving: the first forecast is compared against the spreadsheet, expected dates are set where they differ from due dates, and the budgets the workbook carried are entered by pasting values into the tool, since it does not import a spreadsheet file. Write those hours down, and add the hour of the cash meeting in which the team reads the new forecast for the first time.

Upkeep is what the tool leaves with the team. Data arrives automatically once a day at an hour you choose, with a manual sync when needed, so the gathering and re-keying lines from the spreadsheet model go to zero. What remains is judgement: reviewing expected payment dates, adjusting budgets when the picture changes, and reading the result. That is a line, not nothing, and the case should say what it costs.

Exit belongs on the same line. Ask the vendor how you would leave: what the export gives you, in what format, and what happens to the data after you cancel. Float exports the forecast to PDF or CSV on demand and lets you cancel and delete company data yourself. Price the hours it would take to rebuild the spreadsheet if you had to, because that is the cost the FD is being asked to accept alongside the subscription.

When the spreadsheet is still the right answer

A case that cannot say when it would fail is not a case. Line 9 states the conditions under which the team would recommend staying with the spreadsheet, and the FD reads it before anything else, because it tells them whether the rest of the page was written to reach a conclusion.

The professional guidance supports the spreadsheet more than a vendor's page usually admits. ICAEW's Business Finance Guide says a cash flow forecast can be created in a spreadsheet, an app or an online accounting system, and that depending on the maturity and complexity of the business a simple spreadsheet can give the insight needed. ICAEW's Twenty Principles for Good Spreadsheet Practice ask the user to decide whether a spreadsheet is the suitable tool at all, and to reconsider when another application would serve better or when the people using it can no longer understand and maintain it. No professional body sets a headcount, an entity count or a review frequency at which a dedicated tool becomes necessary.

So write the conditions in those terms. The spreadsheet remains the right answer when one person maintains it and understands it fully, when the volume of invoices and bills is low enough to refresh by hand inside the weekly cycle, when the business is a single entity in one currency, when the forecast is read monthly rather than weekly, and when the decisions it informs have not been late or wrong in the last quarter. If those hold today, say so, recommend the trial rather than the subscription, and give the date on which you will look again. If they do not hold, say which ones have gone, because that is the strategic case in one line.

The paragraph for the IT Manager

The security question does not sit on the value side or the cost side; it is a gate, and it is faster to pass it in the case than to be sent back for it. The National Cyber Security Centre publishes a short set of yes-or-no questions for smaller organisations assessing a cloud service, covering encryption at rest, whether two-factor authentication can be required for every user, whether administrators are separate from standard users, whether security logs and an incident process exist, and where data is processed and stored; it recommends the full fourteen cloud security principles for commercially sensitive data. Under UK GDPR, a business appointing a processor must be satisfied that the processor gives sufficient guarantees, and must have a written contract that covers deletion or return of personal data at the end.

Answer each question from the vendor's own documentation. For Float, the help centre states that data flows one way from the accounting platform into Float and nothing writes back; that access is by four roles (Owner, Admin, Editor and Viewer, the last read-only); that two-factor authentication is mandatory for customers connecting Xero and recommended for everyone else; that support access to an account is opt-in and can be switched off; that Float is a hosted application with no installable version; and that a subscription can be cancelled and company data deleted by the customer. Where the documentation is silent, say so on the case rather than filling the gap. Certifications on their own do not answer the questions; it is the evidence behind them that does.

How the subscription sits in the accounts

One sentence per jurisdiction, and confirm it with your accountant before it goes on the page.

Under IFRS, a contract that gives only the right to access the supplier's software is a service contract: the fee is expensed as the service is received, any prepayment is an asset, and configuration or customisation costs are usually expensed too, unless they create something the customer controls. Under UK GAAP the Financial Reporting Council has issued no specific statement on cloud subscriptions, and the treatment is inferred from FRS 102's intangible-asset principles. Under US GAAP, ASU 2018-15 requires qualifying implementation costs of a hosting arrangement that is a service contract to be capitalised and expensed over the term, which is a different answer from IFRS. Australian and New Zealand standards follow the IFRS position through their own standard-setters.

How Float appears in the case

Float is one worked example of filling the template in, not the answer to it. It is a cash flow forecasting tool for finance teams on Xero or QuickBooks Online, with a Sage Intacct connection in development and a waitlist open. It holds a rolling 13-week view and a monthly forecast built from reconciled balances, invoices and bills, imported once a day with a manual sync on demand; scenarios are layers on the base forecast, so a hire or a delayed receipt is tested without touching the base; a cash threshold shows the date the balance is due to cross it; and the forecast exports to PDF or CSV whenever someone asks for it. Nothing is sent on a schedule, no alert is raised, and Float forecasts cash rather than the profit and loss or balance sheet. Automatic VAT and GST forecasting and expected payment dates learned from customers' payment history are available to Xero-connected customers.

On a case, those become lines 5 to 7: the switching hours are checking and pasting rather than migrating; the upkeep hours are expected dates and budgets; the value lines are the decisions the 13-week view changed. Two customers' published words fit the template's shape. Andy Mellor, a fractional CFO, on the upkeep line: "Between downloading bank data, correcting for actuals, changing forecasts, and so on, I'd spend up to two hours a week in Excel," and "In Float, it takes me less than half an hour a week." Marinus Keyser, in-house at BLEND: "What was once a full day of manual cash flow forecasting is now a live, real-time view." Both are individual experiences, one of them across several client businesses, and neither is an average; your own hours go on your case.

Frequently asked questions

What should a business case for cash flow forecasting software contain?

Twelve lines on one page: the decision requested, the problem in one sentence, the cost of the current forecast, the software's price over the commitment period, the switching cost in your own hours, the ongoing upkeep in your own hours, the decisions the weekly cash view would change, the switching value at which the case fails, the conditions under which the spreadsheet remains right, the IT and data answers, the accounting treatment, and a review date with a named owner for each benefit. Every number carries its source.

Who approves a software subscription in a finance team?

No professional or governance body sets out the finance director's role in approving operating spend; boards delegate authority to management and keep the liability, and each business sets its own limits. In practice the finance manager builds the case, the FD or CFO approves the spend, and the IT Manager can block on security grounds, so the case is written for all three: the FD reads lines 3 to 9, the IT Manager reads line 10, and the accountant confirms line 11.

How do I show the return on cash flow forecasting software?

Not as a percentage. Return figures and payback periods for software come from vendors' calculators and are the first thing an FD discounts. Show the decisions the weekly cash view would have changed in the last quarter with the cash each affected, mark which of them release cash, and give the switching value: how much smaller those lines could be before the subscription, switching and upkeep costs exceed them. A case that shows where it would fail is more persuasive than one that shows a number.

What does it cost to switch from a spreadsheet to forecasting software?

There is no published figure for a business of 11 to 50 people, and the components depend on the tool. For one that builds the forecast from the accounting platform, the switching cost is hours rather than a migration: connecting the platform, checking the first forecast against the spreadsheet, pasting in the budgets the workbook carried, setting expected dates on open invoices and reading the result with the team. Price those hours at the loaded rates you used to cost the spreadsheet, and put the total on the case as your estimate.

How much time does a finance team save with cash flow forecasting software?

No independent study measures the hours a finance team of this size spends on its forecast, so there is no saved-hours benchmark to quote. Published customer statements describe individual experiences, from a full day of manual forecasting to under an hour a week, and from two hours a week in a spreadsheet to half an hour; they are not averages. The case should carry your own before-and-after hours, labelled as your estimate, and the decisions those hours changed.

When is a spreadsheet still the right tool for cash flow forecasting?

When one person maintains it and understands it fully, transaction volume is low enough to refresh by hand each week, the business is a single entity in one currency, the forecast is read monthly, and the decisions it informs have been on time and right. ICAEW's guidance says a forecast can be kept in a spreadsheet and that a simple one can be enough depending on the maturity and complexity of the business; its spreadsheet principles ask you to reconsider when the people using it can no longer understand and maintain it.

What security questions will IT ask about a cloud forecasting tool?

The National Cyber Security Centre's short assessment for smaller organisations asks whether data is encrypted at rest, whether two-factor authentication can be required for all users, whether administrator and standard users are separated, whether security logs and an incident process exist, and where data is processed and stored, with the full fourteen cloud security principles recommended for commercially sensitive data. Under UK GDPR the business must also be satisfied the processor gives sufficient guarantees and must have a written contract covering deletion or return of personal data at the end. Answer each from the vendor's documentation.

How is a cash flow forecasting subscription treated in the accounts?

Under IFRS, an access-only subscription is a service contract, expensed as the service is received, with configuration costs usually expensed too unless they create something the customer controls. Under UK GAAP the FRC has issued no specific statement and the treatment is inferred from FRS 102. Under US GAAP, ASU 2018-15 can require qualifying implementation costs to be capitalised and expensed over the term. Australia and New Zealand follow IFRS. Confirm the line with your accountant before it goes on the case.

The case is quicker to write than it looks, because most of the numbers are already in your own model and on the vendor's pricing page, and the two lines that are not, switching and upkeep, are estimates you are better placed to make than anyone. If line 8 is tight, start a free 14-day trial of Float and fill the template from real hours on your own forecast before the FD sees it.