The cash forecast that reads the books instead of the spreadsheet
Buy this instead of hiring
Somebody in your office rebuilds the cash forecast every Monday. They pull the bank balance, the receivables aging and the payables list, paste all three into last week's spreadsheet, and then do the part that is actually the job: decide which customers will really pay this month. The pasting takes an hour. The deciding is what the forecast is worth.
Those are two different problems. Moving numbers out of the accounting system is clerical. Knowing that the county pays in sixty days whatever the terms say, that the new customer pays fast, and that one account is about to stop paying altogether is judgment, and it lives in one person's head.
As of late September 2026, Lunos says it offers a free cash flow forecast that connects to QuickBooks, NetSuite or Xero, keeps the data synchronized, and estimates receipts from how each customer has actually paid. You change it in plain sentences, for instance to model two engineers starting in October, and it shows the previous month's forecast alongside what happened. Lunos says it is available now, in an announcement dated September 22, 2026; the CPA Practice Advisor write-up restates that press release, so every detail here is the vendor's claim.
What it cannot know is what is not in the books yet: work sold but not invoiced, the unsigned change order, the truck you are about to buy. If your forecast is mostly those items, the tool fills the grid and you still do the forecast.
The honest no: our rule of thumb is that with fewer than about fifteen paying customers, payment history is too thin to predict anything, and a forecast you can hold in your head does not need a login.
Trucks with a clean record stopped stopping at the scale
Reorganize and the job disappears
Think about what everybody in your business has to stop for: every delivery counted at the dock, every sub's invoice checked against the PO. The check exists to catch the few that are wrong, and it costs the same on the many that are fine.
Weigh stations were like that: pull off, queue, get weighed and checked, pull back out. Oregon killed that stop for compliant trucks long ago: its Green Light program verifies a truck's size, weight, registration and safety record as it drives, and passing trucks with a transponder are waved by. By the state's count: a million trucks cleared by February 2001, thirty-five million by June 2023.
What changed in August is the price of entry. The state told Trucking Dive it went live statewide on August 4 with the PrePass mobile app, which sends a carrier's safety scores and credential data to enforcement; trucks meeting Oregon's standards may be cleared past nineteen weigh stations at highway speed. PrePass and the state say each bypass saves up to seven minutes, nearly half a gallon of fuel and up to $11.75 in operating costs, and the app needs no new hardware.
The stop did not get faster. For a cleared truck it stopped existing: the scale is built into the road, and everything else is answered from a record the state already held.
That is the move to steal. Sort the parties you check by history and stop checking the clean ones every time: the supplier who has shipped right for two years, the sub whose last forty invoices matched. Then inspect the exceptions properly.
The honest no: pre-clearance needs a record. If nobody has written down which suppliers ship short or which subs bill wrong, there is nothing to clear against; start keeping one.
Nobody knows the sub is done until someone reads the email
Nothing off the shelf fits
At four on a Thursday the project manager has ten emails from subcontractors. Three say "done" and nothing else. Two are PDF service reports from the electrician's own system. One is six photos with no words. Four are invoices for work she has not confirmed was finished. Each has to be matched to a job, read, believed or not, and typed into the work-order system as complete. Until then the job shows open, the customer cannot be billed and the sub cannot be paid.
One email, four different questions
"Close out the sub" looks like one action. It is four questions with different requirements.
Which job is this? A lookup, but a hard one, because the sub writes "the Miller place" and the system says WO-4471. Half the reading time goes here.
What did they actually do? Extraction: work performed, hours, materials, what they found.
Is it enough to pay them? A rule, and this company's own rule: the scope matches the PO line, photos or a signed ticket are attached, the lien waiver is in, the insurance certificate has not expired. Every shop has this list; in our experience almost none has written it down.
Do I believe it? Judgment, and the only part that needs the project manager. It comes last, after the lookup and the typing have used up her attention.
What Microsoft says it is building
In a roadmap entry dated September 24, 2026, Microsoft describes an agent for Dynamics 365 Field Service that processes supported subcontractor emails and service reports, identifies the matching work order and booking, and prepares a closeout proposal that can include status changes plus the completion summary, work performed, notes, recommendations, requested follow-up and labor duration. A dispatcher reviews the draft against the original email, corrects it and applies it. Anything the agent cannot match confidently, or that comes from a sender who isn't authorized, or is missing required information, goes to a person instead of being applied quietly.
Read the status before you do anything with that. As of late September 2026 the entry's status reads "In development," preview October 2026, rollout start February 2027. It is not for sale, and only Microsoft's own description of it was available; nothing here has been confirmed by anyone but the vendor. Microsoft also says what it will not do: create follow-up work, process payroll or invoices, or create parts and product-consumption records, "unless those capabilities are delivered separately."
So it answers the first two questions, for shops on Dynamics 365 Field Service, and in our experience few businesses of our readers' size run it. The third and fourth it does not touch, and the third is where the money is.
What would have to be built
Nothing we found off the shelf does this for a shop on ServiceTitan, Jobber, Buildertrend or a spreadsheet, because it spans four things no vendor owns together: your inbox, your job system, your accounting package and the folder where the insurance certificates live.
The thing to build is a reader for your own inbox. It takes each sub's email, whatever form it arrives in, and finds the job and the PO line in the system you actually run. It pulls out what was done, when and by whom. Then it checks that against your pay conditions, the ones you would have to write down first, and produces one record per submission: ready to pay, or not ready and why, with the original email attached. The project manager confirms or overrides. Anything unmatched, unknown or incomplete lands in a short queue.
The judgment to encode is the pay-conditions list. The data that has to move is the job number, the PO line, the certificate expiry and the lien-waiver status. The record to assemble is the one your bookkeeper currently rebuilds by asking the PM.
The honest no: if you pay fewer than about ten subcontractor invoices a week, do not. The project manager already knows every job; the reading is not the bottleneck.
If your subs report by phone and text and never in writing, there is nothing to read. The fix is a rule, not software: no written report with photos, no payment. Enforce that for a quarter first. It removes more delay than any reader, and it is the raw material the reader would need anyway.
And if the pay-conditions list has never been written down, write it. That document, argued out with the PM and the bookkeeper, is worth more than the automation, and half the time it settles whether to build one.
If one of these is your Thursday afternoon, the ten agent roles are in the Library.