The year does not hand out the money evenly

The sheet from the last topic says this restaurant will earn $46,200 next year. It also says it will lose money in January and February. Both statements are true at the same time, and living with them is a different skill from making the plan — because the profit arrives in August and the shortfall arrives five months later, by which time somebody has usually spent it. This topic is the third template: the same twelve months, looked at as money moving rather than as profit earned.

💸 The year the plan already showed you

Go back to the result column. January plans to lose $570 and February $1,590, which is $2,160 that has to come from somewhere. July, August and December plan to make $25,830 between them, which is more than half the year. Everything else hovers around a few thousand. Nothing there is a surprise or a problem — it is the shape of the business, and every seasonal restaurant has one — but written down it turns into a single practical question: on the first of January, is August's money still in the bank?

For most small restaurants the honest answer is no, and not because anyone was reckless. A good August feels like the business working, so that is when the second fryer gets bought, the bonus gets paid, the owner finally takes something out. Each decision is defensible on its own and none of them is made against the calendar, because until the year is written down there is no calendar to make them against. That is the whole reason this sheet exists.

Note what this topic is not. Knowing which day of the month your balance hits bottom, how supplier terms move it and when each platform pays you is the financial reporting course — that sheet has days down the side and covers next month. This one has months down the side and covers next year. You need both, and they answer different questions: one keeps you out of trouble in three weeks, this one keeps you out of trouble in seven months.

📅 What goes on the cash calendar

The calendar starts as a copy of the result row from your budget, and then you add everything that moves money without appearing on the P&L — or that appears there smoothly while leaving the bank in lumps.

The oven is the clearest case of the gap. Buying it takes $15,000 out of the account in one afternoon and costs the P&L $250 a month for five years, so a budget that shows a comfortable June and a calendar that shows June emptied out are both correct. Add these rows and the calendar tells you the only thing you actually need from it: the running balance at the end of each month, and therefore which month is thinnest.

For this restaurant that month is February, and the calendar says so in October, which is the point.

🏦 Setting money aside on purpose

Once the shape is on paper the response is straightforward, and it is the single most useful habit in this course. Add up what the thin part of the year needs, decide which good months will fund it, and move that money out of reach as it arrives.

Here the arithmetic is small: $2,160 to cover January and February, plus $15,000 for the oven in June, is $17,160 of known needs. Rounding up, the plan is to set aside $20,000 across July, August and December — about $6,700 in each of those months — into an account that is not the operating one. It is not sophisticated. It works because the money is physically somewhere else on the day the temptation shows up.

• Separate the account. Money in the operating balance is money that looks available, and everything else on this list depends on it not looking available.
• Take it on the way in, not what is left. A fixed transfer at the start of a good month survives. "Whatever remains at the end" never does.
• Give each amount a name. "February" and "oven" are budgets. "Savings" is a pot that gets raided, because nothing specific is lost when it goes.
• Do it in the good months only. There is no virtue in transferring money out of February and borrowing it back in March.
• Then build a floor underneath all of it. A fortnight of fixed costs — about $11,250 here — is a reasonable first target, and a full month, $22,500, is where you want to end up. That money is not for February and not for the oven. It is for the compressor that fails in a week you did not plan.

The floor is the one people skip, and it is the difference between a bad month and an emergency. A restaurant with a month of fixed costs in reserve treats a broken freezer as an annoyance; a restaurant without one treats it as a decision about which supplier to pay late — and delaying suppliers costs you your terms, which quietly makes every following month harder.

🛒 Big purchases get a month, not a mood

The last job of the calendar is to decide when the large, discretionary things happen, and this is where a budget stops being paperwork and starts making decisions for you.

Anything that is not urgent — equipment, a refit, a new sign, a deposit on a second site — goes on the calendar in a month that can carry it, which in this restaurant means after a good stretch and never in the first quarter. The oven sits in June for exactly that reason: May and June plan $8,040 of profit between them, the set-aside from the previous year is intact, and the two thinnest months are behind rather than ahead. Buying the same oven in January would have been the identical purchase at a completely different level of risk.

The other half of that discipline is knowing what a purchase does to the twelve months after it. A $15,000 oven is not a $15,000 decision: it is $15,000 of cash, plus whatever it changes in the running costs, minus whatever it saves. If it is financed, it becomes a fixed monthly payment that raises your break-even for years, and that belongs in the budget before you sign, not after. The arithmetic for judging that is in the next topic and the one after it, and it is genuinely one division — but it has to happen while the answer can still be no.