I’m currently building an AI-powered tool for businesses to manage cash flow.

The idea is to go beyond forecasting. Instead of only showing what might happen, it would act as a decision layer helping users understand what actions they could take, such as delaying an expense, following up on an invoice, or preparing for a possible cash shortage.

I’m trying to understand what people would realistically expect from a tool like this.

• Which decisions should it help with?
• How much access to financial data would you be comfortable giving it?
• Would you trust it to recommend actions, or would you mainly want it to explain different options?
• What would make its recommendations feel trustworthy?
• What would make you stop using it?

I’m not promoting anything I’m still building and trying to avoid making assumptions about what users actually need. Would appreciate honest opinions, especially from business owners or people who manage company finances.

I've been trying to understand something about small-business cash flow.

Most established businesses already have some combination of a bookkeeper, QuickBooks/accounting software, bank statements, AR/AP reports, P&Ls, etc.

So theoretically, the financial information is already there.

But cash flow still seems to be a major problem.

QuickBooks' 2026 small-business research found that 59% of businesses had invoices more than 30 days overdue, and businesses waiting on unpaid invoices were owed about $17.7K on average. It also found that 39% of owners had a late payment make it difficult to cover payroll or bills during the previous year.

That made me wonder whether the real problem is actually a lack of financial data.

For example, knowing:

• $70K of AR is overdue
• payroll is due next week
• a large vendor payment is coming
• one project is consuming more cash than expected
• a customer normally pays late

is useful information.

But someone still has to decide:

Do I push collections harder?

Delay a vendor payment?

Change payment terms?

Require a larger deposit on the next job?

Use the credit line?

Delay hiring?

Turn down new work because it will consume too much cash?

So for business owners, bookkeepers, accountants, or fractional CFOs:

Where does the process actually break down?

Is the accounting data itself usually incomplete/outdated?

Is forecasting the problem?

Or is the harder part turning all that financial information into a decision about what to actually do next?

I’m exploring an idea around cash flow for small businesses, and I’d rather hear why it wouldn’t work than get polite validation.
The basic observation is that most accounting/banking tools can tell you how much cash you have, what’s outstanding, and sometimes forecast what’s coming.

But knowing the numbers doesn’t necessarily answer the harder question:

What should I actually do about it?
For example, imagine a business knows cash could get tight in the next few weeks.
They might have:
customer invoices that may or may not arrive on time
payroll and bills coming up
some vendor payments that could potentially be moved
customers worth prioritizing for collections
a credit line they could use
business-specific constraints or relationships that aren’t obvious from the accounting data
The idea I’m exploring is a system that looks at the financial situation plus those business constraints and recommends what actions to take and in what order.

Something like:
“You’re likely to be short by ~$35K around the 25th.
Prioritize collecting these two invoices first.
Don’t rely on this invoice because it’s disputed.
Don’t delay this vendor because you’ve marked them as critical.
If the expected payment hasn’t arrived by the 22nd, move this eligible payment.
Only use the credit line for the remaining gap.”
The goal wouldn’t be another cash-flow dashboard or just an AI chatbot explaining your accounting data. It would be more like a financial decision-support system that helps answer:

“Given what’s happening in my business, what should I do next?”
Eventually it could learn from what actually happened which customers paid late, which actions worked, which vendors were flexible, etc.

Now roast it.

If you run a business:
Would this actually solve something painful?
Or do business owners already know what actions to take once they see their cash position?
Would you trust software to make recommendations like these?
What information would it need before you’d consider its recommendations credible?
And most importantly: what would make you NOT use something like this?
I’m specifically looking for reasons this idea could fail, not encouragement.

Need some advice from founders who've been through this.

I'm realizing that running a business isn't just about increasing revenue it's about making the right decisions with the cash you have at the time.

Here's a situation I'm trying to think through.

Let's say I'm running a growing SaaS company.

Things are generally going well. Revenue is growing, customers are happy, and there are opportunities to expand. But then everything seems to happen at once.

• A large customer payment that I expected this week gets delayed by another 30–45 days.
• Payroll is coming up in about two weeks.
• A great engineer becomes available, and if I don't hire them now, I'll probably lose them.
• Marketing is finally starting to work, and increasing the budget could accelerate growth.
• A vendor is offering a meaningful discount if I pay early.
• My accountant says the business is profitable, but my bank account doesn't feel like it.

None of these decisions are obviously wrong.

I could:

• protect cash and delay hiring,
• invest in growth,
• use a line of credit,
• wait for customer payments,
• negotiate with vendors,
• or do something completely different.

What I'm struggling with isn't building a forecast it's deciding which action should come first when several good options compete for the same cash.

For founders who have actually managed a growing business:

• How do you make these decisions?
• Do you have a framework you follow?
• Do you look at specific numbers every week?
• Is it mostly experience and intuition?
• What's one mistake you made early on that changed how you think about cash?

I'd really appreciate hearing how you approach it in the real world.

Hypothetical situation based on a small construction company:

The company is doing around $2M/year and has enough work coming in. The problem is cash never seems to be there when it's needed.

Right now there's roughly $180K in unpaid customer invoices. Some are recent, but around $70K has been outstanding for 60+ days.

One customer is holding about $30K because they're disputing a change order.

At the same time, subcontractors and suppliers still need to be paid, payroll hits every two weeks, and materials often have to be purchased well before the company gets paid for the job.

They also have another decent-sized project coming up, but taking it means putting more cash into labor and materials before collecting much from the customer.

The business is profitable on paper and there's work in the pipeline, so cutting expenses doesn't seem like the whole answer.

Would you focus first on getting the old receivables collected, changing deposits/progress billing on new jobs, negotiating supplier terms, resolving the disputed amount, or even turning down new work until the cash position improves?

For anyone who's dealt with this in construction, what would you look at first?