Cash Flow
You know that a cash-flow rule is what puts an amount into time, and that without one the amount is simply absent.
A budget says an account costs €80,000. A financing plan says a source pays €80,000. Either way, a cash flow plan needs to know **when** that money moves. The thing that answers is the **cash-flow rule**.
A cash-flow rule lives on the budget account or the financing source — not here. It says either:
- **milestones** — 40% at contract, 40% at start of shoot, 20% at delivery; or - **a payment cycle** — spread evenly over a period.
The plan reads those rules and places the money in the periods they resolve to, for expenses and income alike. That is the entire mechanism. Setting one is a budgeting or financing job, not a cash-flow one — see [set a cash flow rule on an account](/kb/article/set-a-cashflow-rule-on-an-account) and [set a cash flow rule on a source](/kb/article/set-a-cashflow-rule-on-a-source).
**This is the module's defining behaviour and the source of most of its support questions.**
An account or a source with no cash-flow rule does not appear at the start of the plan, or at the end, or in an "unscheduled" bucket. It is **not in the plan at all** — and the plan's total is short by exactly that amount.
The app says so directly, for both sides: *N accounts have no cash flow rule, so X is not in this plan* and *N sources have no cash flow rule, so X is not in this plan*.
That is a deliberate design rather than an oversight. No default would be right: money that nobody has scheduled has no defensible date, and inventing one would put a wrong number in front of a financier with nothing to signal it.
Because absence is silent, the plan warns instead — with the count **and the amount**. That amount is exactly what the plan is missing, which makes the warning a reconciliation tool rather than a nag — see [why something is missing from the plan](/kb/article/why-something-is-missing-from-the-plan).
Missing rules turn up on either side of the plan — see [find accounts without a cash flow rule](/kb/article/find-accounts-without-a-cash-flow-rule) for the expenses half and [find sources without a cash flow rule](/kb/article/find-sources-without-a-cash-flow-rule) for the income half. Against a cost-control set, a rule can also point at the past instead of being missing outright — see [fix an outdated cash flow rule](/kb/article/fix-an-outdated-cash-flow-rule).
A milestone is stored as an **offset**, not a fixed date. Move the shoot two weeks later and every payment anchored to it moves too — across the budget, the financing plan and this grid, in one edit.
This is the reason to prefer milestone rules to fixed cycles for anything tied to the schedule — see [show milestones on the plan](/kb/article/show-milestones-on-the-plan).
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