Cashflow Forecasting for Project Based Consulting Firms
Your costs are certain. Your revenue isn’t.Know what you can spend anyway.
Thyme forecasts your cash at bank from live projects and pending proposals, month by month, so growth is a decision, not a gamble.
Built for founder-led practices in environmental engineering, planning and ecology across Australia.
Revenue Forecast
Cash position and receipt projections for Acme Co. · AUD
Cash at Bank Forecast
Running bank balance — actuals collapse to the solid line, forecast reprojects forward with a confidence band.
Revenue Forecast
Expected cash receipts landing each month — boxes show the most-likely range, whiskers the worst / best case.
* Thyme is in build phase, actual UI may vary from screenshots.
The problem
The number that should run a practice never lives anywhere.
How much cash you’ll have, and what it frees you to do next: that one number ought to run the firm. Instead it gets rebuilt by hand every month, from a pipeline, a workforce plan and an accounting tool that each tell a different story, and it’s stale the moment it’s finished. Most firms answer it with a spreadsheet. The serious ones eventually hire a CFO to keep it current.
Spreadsheets Thyme.
Who keeps it honest
Three people keep it true. One gets to decide.
A forecast is only as good as the people who own its inputs. In Thyme the person closest to each piece keeps it honest, and it all rolls into one number the owner can actually act on.
At a smaller practice one person often wears several of these hats. The owner is the constant.
Bid Lead / Sales
Wins the work.
Grooms the proposal backlog. Keeps each live proposal's probability, start month and delivery shape honest, so the pipeline feeds the forecast as real future billings, not a number parked on a close date.
Project Manager
Runs the work.
Keeps the won-work billing forecast honest: when each active job will actually bill across the months of delivery still ahead of it. Work in hand is a tail, not a lump.
Bookkeeper / Finance
Closes the month.
Enters the month's actual billings by project, the lumpy expenses, and the bank, AR and WIP position. Reality goes in once a month, from the person who keeps the books, so the forecast re-bases on what's true.
Owner / Principal
Makes the call.
Gets one live, trustworthy cash-at-bank forecast in three scenarios, and acts on it.
- When to hire.
- Whether to open a region.
- Whether an acquisition is affordable.
- When dividends can come out.
- What working capital to hold.
And the one that matters most: where a small intervention now heads off the eleventh-hour redundancy later.
Three owners of truth, one connected model, with every line carrying who set it and when.
How it works
Two streams of billings, netted against what leaves the bank.
Thyme forecasts cash from the two things that actually drive it. Won work bills out across its remaining delivery, a tail, not a lump. Live proposals bill across the months they’d run if they land, weighted by how likely they are. Net both against your outflows (salaries, overheads, and the lumpy obligations a monthly average hides, like tax, insurance and the super run) and you get the cash position twelve months out, scrollable to eighteen, in three scenarios: Most likely, Best and Worst.
A deliberate choice
Your actuals come from the people who know. Not a bank feed.
Thyme doesn’t plug into your bank to guess at your numbers. A bank feed sees “a client paid $50,000” but not which project it belongs to. That per-project detail is the whole reason the forecast holds up, so it’s entered once a month by whoever closes your books. Owned and right, rather than automatic and blind to the one thing that matters: which job the money belongs to.
Audit
Every number on this page has a name on it.
Each forecast row carries the PM, the stage and the timestamp it was set. When the partners disagree about a number, the system shows you the proposal it came from and who moved it. The disagreement gets shorter every quarter.
Forecast row
PR-001 · Reviewed todayChange history
Last 6 months- SC
Sarah Chen · Moved stage Open tender → Invited tender
4m ago
- SC
Sarah Chen · Updated start date Jul 22 → Aug 5
21m ago
- JH
James Hargrove · Approved fee revision $171,200 → $184,500
Yesterday, 4:18pm
- PS
Priya Subramanian · Created proposal at 50% · $171,200
12 May
* Thyme is in build phase, actual UI may vary from screenshots.
Built for Australia
Your fiscal year. Your leave rules. Your holidays.
Thyme runs on Australian fiscal years, Fair Work leave entitlements, and per-state public holidays. Not a generic SaaS settings panel that forces your finance team to translate dates and balances every Friday.
Locale
Workspace settings- Fiscal year
- 1 Jul to 30 Jun
- Leave model
- Fair Work · 4 weeks + 10 days personal
- Holidays
- Public holidays · NSW
* Thyme is in build phase, actual UI may vary from screenshots.
Founding firms
The first cohort is being chosen now.
Thyme is being built with a small group of founder-led practices in environmental engineering, planning and ecology across Australia. Founding firms shape what ships, and pay for it accordingly.
Migration on us
We migrate you off your forecasting spreadsheet and stand Thyme up on your real pipeline. Traded for design-partner feedback, not charged.
A seat at the table
Direct input on what ships next. The kernel is narrow on purpose; what comes after it is partly your call.
Founding-firm pricing
Whatever the long-term price lands at, founding firms keep their introductory rate for as long as they're on Thyme.
More to come
Thyme ships the kernel first.
The cash position is where Thyme starts: the smallest thing that runs a practice. More of the firm’s operating picture ships in disciplined steps.
- NEXT
Workload & capacity
Plan the people who'll deliver the work, against the same forecast.
- SOON
Delivery
Run the work on the plan it was won on.
- SOON
Month-end close
Close the month from one screen.
- SOON
Opportunity tracking
Curated go/no-go — track what you're chasing and score it before you spend time on a proposal.
- SOON
Project management
Build projects up from tasks and people, the way you currently do in spreadsheets — but connected to the forecast.
- SOON
Time & expense tracking
Log time and expenses against projects, so delivery and billing stay on the same plan the work was won on.
- SOON
Proposal intelligence
Win-rates, timing and pricing that learn from what actually happened.
A roadmap, not a set of dates. We hold the kernel narrow on purpose.
* Actual UI may vary from screenshots shown.
Getting started
We’ll move you off the spreadsheet.
We’re choosing a small founding group of practices now, with onboarding from October 2026. Get early access and we’ll set Thyme up on your real pipeline (and migrate you off the spreadsheet) as the first release rolls out.
Founding cohort
Be one of the first practices on Thyme.
We’re choosing a small founding cohort to shape the first release, onboarding October to December 2026. If that’s your firm, come and help build it.