SaaS Cash Flow Template

Once the 13-week sheet is set up, move to the MRR to Cash Bridge. Enter your billing system's MRR figures for the past 3-6 months, then apply your actual collection rate — check your billing platform's failed payment report to see what percentage of invoices go uncollected each month. If you have significant annual contract volume, work through the Annual Contract Timing sheet as well, entering each deal with its payment terms. These two sheets together will show you where your cash-versus-MRR gap comes from and how to close it by improving dunning, tightening payment terms, or shifting more customers to annual upfront billing.

The SaaS cash flow cycle has three timing gaps worth modeling explicitly. First, the collection gap: even with good dunning, 5-15% of monthly MRR fails to collect in the billing month. Stripe's Smart Retries recover most of it, but over a 30-90 day window — meaning some MRR counted in month 1 actually arrives as cash in month 2 or 3. Second, the annual contract timing gap: a $60K annual deal signed December 31 with net-30 terms means $60K of cash arrives in late January — often a full quarter after the MRR was counted. Third, the payroll and infrastructure concentration: SaaS companies typically pay 50-70% of their expenses on two dates — the 15th and last day of the month for payroll, and on a monthly cycle for cloud costs. This concentration means specific days are high-risk for cash balance dips.