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Put in your cash and the last three months of sales and costs. See how long you can keep going, then try what happens if sales fall, you hire someone, or a big bill lands.
Your cash
What you could spend this week
The last three months
Rough figures are fine. Sales in, costs out, including your own pay if you take it.
What if… (optional)
Switch any of these on and watch the answer move.
Sales change
A new monthly cost (a hire, a lease)
A one-off cost (equipment, a tax bill)
Your cash runway
You spend about $2,500 more than you take in during a typical month.
We'll email you the month-by-month table. One click turns it into a free Cashowa account, with your figures already in it.
What this can't see
This assumes every month looks like the last three you typed in. Your real statements show the trend, how much your months actually swing, and which costs are creeping up, and the forecast in Cashowa reads them for you.
Cashowa reads your statements and does it for youFree, Starter and Pro
This page works from three months you typed in. Starter reads your actual statements, learns your trend and how much your months swing, and keeps the forecast current. Here is everything in each plan.
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Cash runway is how many months you can keep going before the bank balance reaches zero, if nothing changes. The simple version is cash divided by burn, where burn is how much more you spend than you take in during a month.
With $24,000 in the bank and three months that netted −$3,000, −$2,000 and −$2,500, a typical month loses $2,500. The runway is $24,000 ÷ $2,500 = 9.6 months. Those are the figures the calculator opens with, so you can check the arithmetic against the page.
One unusually good or bad month should not swing the answer. The calculator takes the middle of your three months, so a big invoice that landed in one of them does not make you look safer than you are, and a one-off bill does not make you look worse.
Your months will not all be the same, and the further ahead you look, the less sure the running total is. The range is how much your three months differ from each other, growing with the square root of the number of months, because independent ups and downs partly cancel rather than simply adding. With three months to go on it is a rough guide, not a promise.
Each one is a plain change on top of your typical month. A fall in sales is that percentage of your average month's sales, taken off every month from next month on. A new cost is subtracted every month from when it starts. A one-off lands in a single month. The projection is then run again, so the gap between the two lines is exactly what the change costs you.
A trend drawn through three months is mostly noise. Sales that went from $8,000 to $10,000 to $12,000 would be projected to keep climbing by the same amount every month, and a year on you would be shown a figure nobody should believe. So this assumes your recent months are typical. Cashowa's own forecast, which learns the trend and the swing from 12 to 24 months of your real statements, can afford to be less cautious. A typed-in estimate cannot.
It counts cash in the bank, not money you are owed, credit you could draw, or stock you could sell. It ignores interest and the timing of tax payments. If a large tax bill or a seasonal slump is coming, add it as a one-off cost in the month it lands.
There is no single right answer, but the typical business is thin. A 2016 analysis by the JPMorgan Chase Institute, drawing on more than 597,000 small businesses, found the median held 27 days of cash buffer: how long its balance would cover its costs if sales stopped. A quarter held 13 days or fewer, and restaurants were lowest, at a median of 16. The “if sales stopped today” figure above is the same idea, worked from your numbers.
A common rule of thumb is three to six months of costs. Businesses with lumpy or seasonal sales need more, because the number that matters is how bad your worst plausible stretch could be, not how a typical month looks.
Invoice on delivery, or take a deposit. Every day an invoice is outstanding is cash you are lending your customer, and it shortens your runway exactly as a cost would.
Rent, a lease, insurance. One conversation changes the monthly figure for as long as the deal holds, which is worth more than trimming ten small things.
Software and subscriptions are the cheapest cost to cut because they need no negotiation, and they are easy to lose track of. Our cancellation guides walk through how to stop them.
A price rise falls straight through to cash, where extra sales bring extra costs with them. Try it with the sales what-if: a small rise in sales is worth less than the same percentage on your price.
Pushing equipment spending back a month or two buys time at no cost. Put the purchase in as a one-off cost and move the month to see the difference.
Upload your bank or card statements and Cashowa builds this forecast from them, learns your real trend, and keeps it current. Free to start.