Cash Flow
You know what an outdated rule is, why it only appears against cost control, and how to clear it.
This is a third way a plan goes wrong, and it appears only when the plan reads a **cost control set**:
*There are accounts with outdated cash flow rules in your cost control. This means that the cash flow rule points to the past, while no payment date has been supplied yet. You need to adapt those rules to display expenses correctly.*
Two facts that contradict each other:
1. The rule says this money moved **in the past**. 2. Nothing has been **paid** — no payment date has been supplied.
Either the money moved and nobody booked it, or it did not move and the rule is now wrong. The plan cannot tell which, so it shows the amount in a period that has already gone — where it is neither a forecast nor a fact.
A plan reading a **budget** is entirely forecast, and a forecast about the past is just an old plan.
A plan reading a **cost control set** is supposed to be reality: the set knows what has been paid. So a rule pointing backwards with no payment against it is a genuine inconsistency, and the module says so.
Work out which of the two is true.
**The money did move.** Book it in cost control — enter the paid amount and pay date on the cost item. The plan then reads the payment date and the rule is no longer the source. See the cost control manual's [mark a cost item as paid](/kb/article/mark-a-cost-item-as-paid).
**The money did not move.** The rule is stale — the payment slipped, the milestone moved, the commitment changed. Update the rule on the account to when you now expect it.
Anchor rules to **milestones** rather than fixed dates wherever the cost follows the schedule. A milestone is an offset: move the shoot and every rule hanging off it moves too, so rules do not fall into the past just because the production did.
Fixed-date rules are the ones that go stale, and they go stale silently until this warning appears.
The warning is a prompt to reconcile a period. Cleared regularly, it is a light habit; ignored for months, it accumulates into a plan whose recent past is fiction.
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