A cashflow forecast in your inbox every Monday
The video below shows it end to end: one instruction to Claude, and from then on a fresh cashflow forecast lands in your inbox every Monday morning, with the Excel file in OneDrive. The video is Dutch-spoken; this article explains what happens under the surface.
What you see in the video is not a bespoke project, and not a connection built specially for the demo. It is a chain of four parts that each do one thing well: Claude as the assistant, the MCP connection to Exact Online for the figures, a forecasting agent for the number-crunching and a scheduled task for the repetition. Each part can be understood on its own, and that is exactly what keeps the setup controllable.
Where the forecast comes from
The question in the video is simple: run a cashflow forecast for the next six months. Claude has no figures of its own, so the first step is always a read request to the administration, through the MCP connection and your own Exact Online access. Claude then calls the forecasting agent, which builds the forecast from what is actually in the books: open receivables and payables with their due dates, actual payment behaviour from history, working capital and the budget for the periods still to come.
The method is hybrid. For the first weeks the agent adds up the open items and their due dates directly; for the months after that it shifts to an indirect approach based on the profit and loss account and the working capital pattern. The assumptions involved, how many weeks the direct count covers, what payment behaviour is assumed, sit in the dashboard and can be adjusted there. The number-crunching itself happens in a deterministic calculation layer; the language model only phrases what comes out.
"Claude does not do the maths itself. The forecast comes out of the same calculation layer every week, with assumptions you can read back and figures pulled from your own administration at that moment."
One instruction, three systems
The second part of the video turns on the follow-up question: make this into an Excel file, put it in OneDrive and mail me an update every Monday. That one sentence touches three systems: Exact Online for the figures, OneDrive for the file and Outlook for the mail. To Claude these are three separate connections that all speak the same protocol, MCP. That is why one instruction can run straight through them without an integration project anywhere.
Claude does none of this silently. In the video you see Claude first ask permission to look into Exact Online, and then again to run the forecast; the same applies to sending mail. Afterwards, the connection’s audit log shows who made which call.
From question to routine: the scheduled task
The closing piece is the scheduled task: an instruction in plain language that Claude runs again at a fixed moment. In the video: call the forecasting agent, save the file to OneDrive and send a mail every Monday at 08:00. The task shows the prompt, its status and the next moment it will run, and you can pause or change it at any time.
The important part: no report is stored and resent. Every Monday the whole chain runs again, against the administration as it stands at that moment. Invoices paid last week have dropped out of the forecast; new purchase invoices are in. The mail that arrives summarises the outcome, with the opening position, the expected end position, the net change and the points of attention, and the full Excel file in your OneDrive underneath.
What to expect from it, and what not
A forecast is only as good as the administration underneath it. Due dates nobody maintains, a budget that stops halfway through the year or purchase invoices that sit unbooked for weeks all come back as noise in the outcome. That is why the agent gives a band rather than a single line, measured against how well the same method did on your own figures in the past.
The weekly rhythm has a function of its own: if the new forecast suddenly deviates from last week’s, something changed in the administration that you want to see. The forecast becomes a signal that comes to you, instead of a report you have to remember to open. The judgement stays with you; the forecast tells you where to look.
Setting it up yourself
- Connect your assistant to Exact Online. That is DataFlowr’s MCP connection: sign in with your own Exact Online account, and the assistant sees exactly what you are allowed to see.
- Connect your mail and storage. In Claude you add Outlook and OneDrive as connectors, so the outcome has somewhere to land. If you work with Gmail and Drive, that works the same way.
- Ask the question once, on its own, first. Run the forecast, walk through the assumptions in the dashboard and check the outcome against your own sense of the numbers. Only then turn it into a scheduled task.
Questions about this setup, or would you like help getting the assumptions right on your own administration? Do get in touch; we are happy to switch it on together with you.
