Cash Flow Report

The Cash Flow report shows when money is spent across your project — broken down by week or month. It distributes each task's budget uniformly across its duration and aggregates into time periods, giving you a spend forecast and cumulative S-curve.

What the Report Shows

Bar chart: Planned spend per period (blue bars). If Actual Cost is entered on tasks, actual spend bars (red) overlay the planned bars.
Cumulative line: The orange S-curve shows total budget consumed over time — this is the classic "S-curve" used in construction and project finance.
Period table: Planned spend, actual cost, cumulative, and % of total budget per period.

Accessing the Report

Click the Reports tab in the titlebar.
In the left sidebar, click 💵 Cash Flow.

Granularity — Weekly vs Monthly

DPlan automatically selects the right granularity:

Weekly: Projects up to ~12 weeks duration. Useful for detailed near-term spend forecasting.
Monthly: Projects over ~12 weeks. Standard for multi-month construction, software or infrastructure projects.

The granularity selection is automatic based on total project span — it cannot be manually overridden, but the underlying data is the same either way.

How Costs Are Distributed

DPlan uses uniform (linear) distribution: each task's total budget is divided evenly across its working days.

Daily spend rate = Task Total Cost ÷ Task Duration (days)

This daily rate is then aggregated into whichever time bucket the day falls in.

Real-world note: Uniform distribution is an approximation. In practice some tasks are front-loaded (materials purchased on day 1) and others back-loaded (lump sum on completion). For most scheduling purposes uniform distribution gives a good enough forecast. Future versions of DPlan may support configurable spend profiles.

Planned vs Actual Bars

If you have entered Actual Cost on tasks:

The blue bar remains (planned spend for that period).
A narrower red bar overlays it showing actual spend distributed across the same task duration.
Periods where the red bar exceeds the blue bar indicate cost overrun in that period.

Actual costs are entered in the Task Editor → Actual Cost ($) field. See Cost Tracking.

Reading the S-Curve

The orange cumulative line shows how the total budget is consumed over time:

Steep early rise: Heavy front-loaded spend (e.g. procurement, mobilisation).
Gradual middle: Steady construction/development phase.
Flattens at the end: Tail-end commissioning and punch-list work, lower spend rate.

A healthy project S-curve is roughly sigmoid (gentle start, steep middle, gentle end). A very flat start followed by steep middle often indicates procurement delays.

Using Cash Flow for Finance Planning

The cash flow chart answers the question "How much working capital do I need and when?"

Question	How to read it
Peak monthly outflow?	Find the tallest bar — that's your highest-spend month.
When is 50% of budget spent?	Find where the cumulative line crosses 50% on the Y-axis.
Front-loaded or back-loaded?	If the line rises steeply early, the project is front-loaded.
Are we tracking to plan?	Compare actual (red) vs planned (blue) bars each period.

Cash Flow vs Earned Value

Cash Flow shows when you spend. Earned Value (EVM) shows whether you're getting value for money. Use both together:

Cash Flow → financing, cash gap, payment schedule alignment.
EVM → cost efficiency (CPI), schedule efficiency (SPI), forecast at completion (EAC).

Printing and Exporting

Click the 🖨 button in the report header to print or save as PDF. The SVG chart is included in the print output.

Prerequisites

The Cash Flow report requires at least one task with a cost (either Fixed/Material Cost or assigned resources with day-rates). If no cost data exists, the report shows an empty-state message with guidance.