Budgeting tells you what happened and whether this month is on track. Neither tells you whether you can afford the thing in March.
Spendly projects forward in two horizons: about 90 days for liquidity, and 12 months for planning.
The 90-Day Cash Flow Projection
A roughly three-month projection of your balance, built from your recurring commitments and your budgeted spending.
What it’s really for is finding the low point — the day in the next quarter where your balance is at its worst. Most people have no idea when that is, and it’s almost never today.
Knowing it changes decisions. If the trough is £180 in six weeks, then the purchase you’re considering this weekend isn’t really a question about this weekend. Everything looks affordable when you only look at today’s balance.
- Projects out about 90 days
- Built from your commitments and budgets
- Shown in your base currency
- Surfaces the low point and when it lands
The 12-Month Year Ahead
The longer view, projected per currency, showing how each month of the coming year is likely to look.
This is where the annual bills stop being ambushes. Insurance in March, road tax in July, Christmas in December — laid out across twelve months so you can see which ones cluster and which months were always going to be difficult.
The typical realisation: three annual renewals land in the same six-week window, and every year you’ve quietly borrowed to cover it without registering the pattern. Once you can see it, sinking funds fix it permanently.
Why Two Horizons
They answer genuinely different questions, and collapsing them into one chart makes both worse.
| 90-day cash flow | 12-month year ahead | |
|---|---|---|
| Question | “Will I run short?” | “Which months are going to hurt?” |
| Precision | Fairly high — most of it is committed | Lower — it’s a shape, not a prediction |
| What you do with it | Delay a purchase, move a payment | Start a sinking fund, plan a big cost |
| Currency | Base currency | Projected per currency |
Short-horizon forecasts are accurate but only help with small decisions. Long-horizon forecasts are vague but change the decisions that actually matter. You want both, kept separate.
What It Can’t Do
This is a projection built from what you’ve told Spendly. It doesn’t know about the bonus you might get, the client who pays late, or the boiler that’s about to fail.
It’s most reliable when your commitments are entered properly and your budgets reflect real spending rather than aspirational spending. A forecast built on a grocery budget you’ve never once hit will be optimistic, and it will be optimistic in a specific, predictable direction.
Treat it as a planning tool, not a guarantee — and if the projection looks fine but you keep running short, the problem is usually that the budgets it’s built on are fiction.
For Irregular Income
If your income varies — freelance, commission, seasonal — the forward view is worth more to you than to anyone else, because the standard monthly budget genuinely doesn’t work for your situation.
The useful pattern is to budget on a conservative month and use the year-ahead view to see whether the lean months are actually survivable, rather than discovering it in the lean month. Combine it with sinking funds for the irregular costs and safe to spend for the daily decisions.