The number your cash-flow report is missing

Here's a small exercise. Pull up your most recent cash-flow report — the one your finance team or your accountant sent you last week. Now ask yourself: does it tell you where cash will be in six weeks, or just where it was?

If you're honest, it's almost always the latter. And you're not alone. The OnDeck/Ocrolus Small Business Cash Flow Trend Report, published at the start of May, surveyed 651 small business owners and found that 31% now rank cash flow as their single biggest concern — overtaking inflation (29%) for the first time in the survey's history.

That shift matters. Inflation is something that happens to you. Cash-flow visibility is something you can actually fix. The question is whether anyone's fixing it.

The strange thing about the current moment is that SMEs are genuinely optimistic. The same OnDeck report found 93% expect growth in 2026. A separate Small Business Expo survey of over 11,000 owners found 82% remain confidentdespite economic pressure.

So it's not a confidence problem. It's a sight problem.

Last week was National Small Business Week in the US, and the theme running through nearly every session — from the SBA/SCORE webinar on AI to the Virtual Summit with Google, Visa, and Amazon — was the same: small businesses have more data than ever and less clarity about what it means.

Integris Design put it bluntly in a blog post last week: SME owners have been "sold shortcuts" by software companies promising automation as a replacement for strategy. The tools multiply. The visibility doesn't.

If margins were comfortable, you could get away with not knowing exactly where cash was leaking. Margins are not comfortable.

The Federal Reserve's Small Business Credit Survey found that 42% of small firms cite tariff-related costs as a financial challenge, and 76% have passed those costs on to customers — which means the pressure is real and the pricing room is shrinking. In the UK, ECI Partners flagged rising National Insurance thresholds and the National Living Wage increase in April as compounding the squeeze.

When every pound matters, not seeing a £10k leak in your working capital cycle isn't a minor inefficiency. It's the difference between making payroll comfortably and sweating through the last week of the month.

If the answer is no, the problem isn't your people. It's your plumbing.

Here's the part that doesn't get enough attention. 58% of small businesses now report using AI, up from roughly 40% in 2024. But Goldman Sachs found that only 14% have AI fully integrated into their operations. The rest are using it for surface-level tasks — drafting emails, generating social media posts, maybe summarising a document.

That's fine as far as it goes. But it creates a false sense of digital maturity. You feel like you're "doing AI" while your actual financial data sits in three different spreadsheets, a bank feed that hasn't been reconciled since February, and an invoicing tool that doesn't talk to your accounting software.

The SBA/SCORE webinar last week made the point that AI is shifting from standalone tools to agent-driven workflows — systems that connect, act, and report back. That shift requires clean, connected data underneath. Without it, the agents have nothing reliable to work with. This is why — and I've seen this pattern repeatedly — a significant share of SME AI projects quietly fail within the first year. The AI wasn't the problem. The data was.

I keep coming back to the same framework, because it keeps being right: fix the data foundations before you bolt on the AI.

That means three things, in order:

First, get a single view of your finances. Not a dashboard that looks pretty but pulls from stale data — an actual unified feed from your bank accounts, invoicing, and accounting tools. This is less a technology problem than a discipline problem. Most of the tools already exist. Someone just has to connect them and keep them connected.

Second, automate the reconciliation work that eats your team's time. I've seen SME owners and their finance staff spend 16 hours a week on admin that a properly configured script could handle in minutes. Bank reconciliation, document extraction, chasing invoice status — this is where automation pays for itself immediately, not in some future AI roadmap.

Third, once you can see your cash position clearly and in near-real-time, then you layer on forecasting. Not before. A predictive model built on dirty data doesn't give you foresight — it gives you confident-sounding nonsense.

This sequence — connect, clean, then predict — is boring. I won't pretend it's glamorous. But it's the difference between an AI project that actually changes how you manage cash and one that gets quietly abandoned by September.

This week, ask your finance team or your accountant one question: how many separate systems touch our cash data, and when was the last time someone checked they all agree?

You're not looking for a perfect answer. You're looking for whether anyone has ever asked. If they haven't, you've found the starting point — and it doesn't require a new platform or a six-month project. It requires someone competent spending a day mapping the data flows and flagging where the breaks are. That map is worth more than any dashboard you'll buy this year.

— Aksel

The Analytical Banker is a weekly note on data, analytics, and AI inside corporate banking — written for finance leaders who actually have to make this stuff work. Reply to this email if something here resonates, or forward it to a colleague who'd benefit.