Know how many weeks your business has, every week
A rolling 13 week cash sheet, a monthly breakeven tracker, and a short guide to the four ways a runway number gets quietly overstated.
What it does
- Gives you a 13 week sheet with cash in, fixed costs, variable costs, draw, tax and debt on one row per week, so the forecast is visible a quarter ahead.
- Writes out breakeven revenue, monthly cash flow and the runway formula, and makes you start from cash available to spend rather than the bank balance.
- Tracks revenue against breakeven every month with a variance column, plus a seasonality table for comparing like months to like months.
- Names the four ways runway gets overstated, and orders the levers from cheapest to slowest so a timing problem is not treated as a structural one.
Resource Teaser Preview
breakeven monthly revenue = (monthly fixed costs + monthly owner draw)
/ contribution margin percentageTo unlock the full kit, complete prompt set, and automated workflow, request access below.
What you need
- Bank access to see when money actually lands, not just when an order is placed.
- Your real payout schedule from your platform, and your variable cost percentage.
- One Monday a week. The sheet is only useful if it is rolled forward.
Setup
- Open 13-week-cash-sheet.md, enter cash available to spend after subtracting gift card balances and customer deposits, then fill the known outflows for all 13 weeks first.
- Fill the cash-in column from your recent weekly revenue, then adjust it for your actual payout schedule and mark every guess with an asterisk.
- Record closing cash, the lowest closing cash in the window, and weeks of runway at the bottom, and treat the low week rather than week 13 as the real number.
- Open breakeven-revenue-tracker.md, calculate breakeven monthly revenue, and fill in one row per month as each month closes.
- Read reading-runway.md, then work the lever list from cheapest to slowest and fill in the fixed costs you could actually cut table before you cut anything.
On a real store
A seasonal homeware brand discovers its best month on paper was a December that had to cover a February, so it moves to looking at total annual cash and the lowest balance in the trough. A fictional store, and no revenue or growth result is claimed for it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much runway does a small business need?
Below about 13 weeks, decisions tend to get made for you. We are not going to call that a rule, because your fixed costs and your season decide it, but it is the point in the sheet where it is worth having options ready.
Why does my runway look fine while I still cannot pay invoices?
Usually one of the four things in reading-runway.md: unredeemed gift card balances counted as your cash, revenue counted as if it lands instantly, a burn averaged over a quarter that included a quiet month, or a fixed cost labelled variable. Each has a line to fix in the sheet.
Should owner draw be in the breakeven?
In this kit, yes, because your draw is a real cost of running this particular business. The tracker also has a separate draw taken column so you can see when the number quietly stopped being true.
Want this done for you instead?
We run the whole audit for you: a scored read of your store, what's costing you sales this week, and what to fix first. $500, most stores get it back in the first fix.
Get the $500 audit