Invoicing is not being paid, and the difference is called cash flow
Who owes you, since when, how much of that is already overdue and what balance you will have in sixty days' time. With the bank statement matched against your invoices, not by eye.
From the due date to the bank entry
They are four different questions — who owes, who pays late, what has come into the bank and what balance is left — and you need all four to sleep at night.
Due dates, split ones included
You write «30/60/90» and the invoice is collected in three instalments, split into whole cents so that the sum always adds up to the total. What is overdue counts only the instalments already past: on a 90-day invoice a third may be owed, not all of it.
Partial payments, properly
Each payment is a row with its date and its amount, and the invoice's status comes out of the sum: you do not mark it «paid» by hand. What is paid is applied to the oldest instalment, which is how a payment on account works.
Debt ageing and reminders
Unpaid invoices are grouped by how late they are, with three colours. The reminder comes drafted in three tones according to what is owed, and it can be fired in a batch at every overdue invoice: it skips those already paid, those from customers with no email address and those chased this week. With the same warning as in invoicing: the message is prepared and sits in the outbox until we connect the sending provider.
Reconciliation against your bank statement
You upload the file in Norma 43 — the AEB's Cuaderno 43, which any Spanish bank exports — or a CSV, and each entry is proposed against the document it belongs to. Duplicates are detected by hash, so uploading the same month twice duplicates nothing.
180-day cash flow forecast
The balance curve is built from what is already committed: invoices issued and unpaid on their due date, expenses recorded and unpaid, and projected subscriptions and fixed costs. With a warning when the line drops below zero.
Exposure per customer before you accept the order
How much they owe you now, how much of that is overdue, how much of their credit limit they have used up and how many days they usually take to pay. With the number of invoices that average comes from, because with two it does not mean much.
Screenshot of the ERP: From the due date to the bank entry
Matching entries without going mad
Reconciling is the most boring part of accounting and the part people get wrong most. These six rules are what make the proposals useful.
- Norma 43 brings the bank's official balance and the amounts in whole cents: there are no commas or signs to guess at.
- An entry matches against what is left to be paid, not against the total: an invoice with 500 already paid matches a transfer of 1,315.
- Several entries can go against the same invoice, and it only becomes paid when the sum covers the total.
- Rules by description for whatever repeats: bank fees that are ignored, charges that become an expense.
- Transfers between your own accounts are matched automatically by amount, date and description, and they are proposed: they are never applied without your confirming them.
- Reconciling records a payment for the amount of the entry; it does not mark the invoice paid in one go.
Batches: what there is today and what there is not
This needs care, because «remesa» means two different things depending on who is asking.
What works today: the SEPA batch for an organisation's membership fees and recurring donations. It generates the pain.008.001.02 file the bank asks for, separates first debits (FRST) from subsequent ones (RCUR) into blocks — the mistake that makes a bank reject a whole batch — shows who is left out and why before anything is created, and when a return comes back it leaves the fee awaiting payment again. It is in the members and fees module.
What also works, and is the opposite: the batch of transfers to suppliers, which generates the pain.001.001.03 of Cuaderno 34 to pay everything that falls due in one go. It is not the direct debit file with the sign flipped — it is a different XML, with different tags and the debtor and creditor roles the other way round — and here no mandate is needed, because the money goes out of your account. What is checked before anything is generated is the IBAN: in a direct debit with a typo the bank sends it back, in a transfer the money leaves.
What is not there yet: the direct debit batch for customer invoices. The mandates are stored on the contact's record, but the file for the bank is still not generated from invoicing. If the way you get paid is by direct debiting invoices to companies, today Cairos does not solve that step for you.
And there is no payment gateway either: the link your customer sees shows the invoice, it does not take card payment for it.
Connecting the bank: how it works and where it stands
As well as uploading the file by hand, Cairos has the automatic PSD2 connection: you choose your bank, identify yourself on your own bank's website and come back connected. No banking password ever passes through Cairos — the regulations banned screen scraping and the banks block it — and from then on the account syncs four times a day, which is the maximum the rules allow without the user present. The permission expires every few months and the ERP warns you fourteen days beforehand.
That said, the piece is built but the aggregator's keys still have to be put on the server, so today the route that works is the usual one: download the bank statement and upload it. With Norma 43 it is one file a month and there is no column to touch.
What the cash flow forecast is and what it is not
The curve projects what is committed: what you have invoiced and not been paid for, what you have recorded and not paid, and the recurring items that repeat. Nothing else.
It does not guess at sales you have not invoiced yet or expenses you have not recorded, and today it does not include payroll, because the payroll module does not exist. If you have staff, the forecast is optimistic to exactly the extent of your wage bill, and it is worth bearing that in mind when you look at the line.
There are no optimistic and pessimistic scenarios yet either, and no comparison against an annual budget. It is a projection, not a financial plan.
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Frequently asked questions
Stop looking at the bank to know how you are doing
Today's balance tells you nothing. The one in sixty days' time does.
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