Key Concepts

This page is the five-minute mental model. Everything else in the docs builds on these terms.

Forecasts

A forecast is one side of your cash flow spread across the project timeline. There are two types:

• Cost forecast — your spend (labour, plant, materials, subcontractors), built from a Procore budget view.
• Revenue forecast — your income (progress claims / billings), built from the head contract's Schedule of Values (SOV).

You can keep many forecasts (different scenarios or revisions), but only one cost and one revenue forecast are active at a time. The active pair is what the cash flow view uses. Activating a forecast deactivates the previous one of the same type.

Line items

A forecast is made of line items — one per budget line or SOV item (for example, "03-300 Concrete" or "Preliminaries"). Each line item carries:

• a total amount to distribute,
• a start and end date,
• a distribution curve that decides the monthly shape, and
• a forecast-to-complete (FTC) mode (below).

Periods

When you set a line item's dates and curve, Cashflow Manager calculates periods — the amount in each month. Periods are the atomic unit of the cash flow: a month's total cost is simply the sum of all cost periods in that month.

• Periods are recalculated whenever you change the dates or curve.
• You can manually override any single month; overrides are preserved and flagged.
• Part-months are prorated by day count — a line that starts on the 15th only gets roughly half of that first month. See Distribution curves.
• Months that hold actuals (below) or fall in a closed billing period are locked from editing.

Forecast-to-Complete (FTC)

Cashflow Manager forecasts the money still to come, not money already spent. Each line item's FTC is calculated one of four ways:

FTC mode	How it's calculated	Use when
Automatic	Total budget − actuals to date	You want the remaining budget forecast forward (default)
Manual	A figure you type in	You have a better estimate than budget-minus-actuals
Lump sum	A single fixed amount	The line is a one-off you'll place yourself
Monitored resources	Σ (quantity remaining × unit rate)	You track labour/plant/materials quantities in Procore

Actuals-to-date plus forecast-to-complete equals the full budget — so the picture always ties back to Procore.

Actuals

You can pull actuals back from Procore — real costs (direct costs) and real revenue (payment applications / progress claims). Synced actuals:

• replace the forecast in the months they cover,
• are marked as actual (not forecast) and locked from editing, and
• shrink the remaining forecast-to-complete accordingly.

This turns a static forecast into a living one: past months show what really happened, future months show the plan.

The cash flow calculation

The cash flow combines the active cost and revenue forecasts. For each period:

Costs       = Σ (cost periods in the month)
Revenue     = Σ (revenue periods in the month)
Net         = Revenue − Costs
Cumulative  = running total of Net

Three adjustments shape the result:

• Retention — optionally withhold a % of revenue each month and release it at the end (see Cash flow analysis).
• Time shifts — delay costs and/or revenue by a number of days to model real payment terms.
• Time scale — view the same data weekly, monthly, or quarterly.

Baselines and snapshots

• A baseline is a saved copy of a cost or revenue forecast you can overlay on the cash flow to see drift from plan.
• A snapshot is a point-in-time capture of the whole forecast state you can keep for the record or compare later.

The three pillars (where the data comes from)

Pillar	Provides	Source in Procore
Budget	Cost line items	Budget Views
SOV	Revenue line items + retention %	Head contract Schedule of Values
Programme	Timing (task dates)	Project schedule (MS Project / Procore)

Reconciliation links these together — matching budget lines to SOV items (for revenue) and to schedule tasks (for timing), manually or with AI assistance. See SOV revenue and Schedule integration.