Analysis for people who invoice and then wait.

Payment behaviour is not distributed around a mean. It is a cluster who pay on time and a few who do not, and the average sits in a gap where no client lives.

Give each client their own distribution and rank by revenue at risk. The useful output is which clients, not what average.

Deposits held against costs not yet incurred, and sales tax collected and not yet paid, are liabilities sitting in a current account looking like cash.

Spending against them works until the quarter ends. Report the bank balance and the available figure side by side so the size of the correction is visible rather than argued about.

A month-end balance can be healthy in a month that went below zero on the fourteenth, and overdraft fees and bounced payments happen on days.

Project a daily balance and name the dates. Keep anything you added by hand — an expected contract, a planned hire — listed separately from anything measured, so the reader can see which part of the line is evidence.

Bank statements covering enough history to show the seasonal shape, outstanding invoices with dates and amounts, and the commitments you already know about: payroll, tax, rent, renewals.

Nothing needs categorising first. That is the part being done for you, and doing it by hand beforehand produces a worse result more slowly.