Getting started with CashflowCycles

Create your account and choose a plan

Start on the plan selection page and pick Starter, Growth or Scale. First-time subscribers get a 30-day free trial, and payments are processed by Stripe. A short onboarding then walks you through creating your account and describing your firm. You can change plans, manage your subscription and download invoices later from Manage Subscription in the account menu.

• ✓Starter ($29/month): 2 bank connections and 1 user. Growth ($59/month): 5 connections and up to 3 users. Scale ($119/month): 15 connections and up to 10 users.
• ✓Annual billing saves 20% on any plan.
• ✓Invoices are available in the Stripe billing portal: account menu › Manage Subscription › Manage Billing.

Connect your bank accounts through Plaid

Open Accounts in the sidebar and choose to connect a bank. The connection runs through Plaid: you sign in to your bank inside the Plaid window, so CashflowCycles never sees or stores your bank login credentials. Access is read-only, which means the app can read balances and transactions but cannot move money. Transactions and balances sync automatically every day, and you can trigger a manual refresh whenever you want the latest figures.

• ✓Connect your main operating account first, then any other accounts your plan allows.
• ✓Bank connections per plan: Starter 2, Growth 5, Scale 15.
• ✓Transaction search covers the last 90 days on Starter and your full history on Growth and Scale.

Read your dashboard

The Dashboard is the first page you see after signing in. Its tiles show your account balances, cash flow trends (income, expenses and net flow), how your spending is distributed by category, your forecast and your most recent transactions. Use the edit mode to add or remove tiles so the page shows what matters to your firm. If a tile is empty right after you connect a bank, give the first sync a moment to finish.

Build a cash flow forecast

Open Forecasting in the sidebar to project your cash position 3, 6 or 12 months ahead. Each forecast shows a base case along with best and worst cases; the width of that range comes from the model's own error when tested against your history, not from a fixed percentage. The page also shows your cash position over the past 12 months, reconstructed from today's balance through your recorded transactions.

• ✓Moving average: the most conservative model, it smooths out month-to-month swings.
• ✓Linear trend: follows the steady upward or downward direction of your cash flow.
• ✓Polynomial: captures curves in your history. Each model needs a minimum number of months of history before it becomes available.

Watch the Obligation Radar and try what-if scenarios

The Obligation Radar is a six-week view of the payments you are already committed to, such as tax remittances, payroll and bills, set against the cash you have on hand. It tells you early whether a tight week is coming. On that same six-week ledger you can run what-if scenarios to see how a decision would change the picture before you make it.

• ✓Lose a client: removes that client's measured monthly value from your inflows.
• ✓Change revenue: raise or lower expected revenue.
• ✓Add a monthly cost: test a new hire, lease or subscription.

Set up alerts

Alerts watch your numbers so you don't have to check every day. Which alerts you can use depends on your plan. Spending alerts, available on Growth and Scale, detect burn-rate acceleration, missed income, unusual spending spikes, new vendors, vendor concentration risk and price increases.

• ✓Starter: 2 alert types, Cash Runway and Projection, plus 5 KPI reports.
• ✓Growth: 6 alert types, email alerts and 13 KPI reports.
• ✓Scale: all 9 alert types, email alerts and 13 KPI reports covering financial health, revenue and operations.

Invite your team and turn on two-step verification

Open Team in the account menu to invite colleagues; Growth and Scale let more than one person use the same company. Admins invite members, assign each one a role, and can suspend, reactivate or remove them at any time. Then protect every account with two-step verification: under Settings, open the Security tab and scan the QR code with an authenticator app.

• ✓Users per plan: Starter 1, Growth up to 3, Scale up to 10.
• ✓Give each person the role that matches what they need to see and do.
• ✓Ask every team member to enable two-step verification on their own account.

Export transactions to CSV

On Growth and Scale, the Transactions page has an Export CSV button that downloads your transactions as a CSV file. Open it in any spreadsheet program, or share it with your bookkeeper or accountant when they need the detail behind your numbers.