The forward view for entrepreneurs

Know what's coming. Before it costs you.

sherloc connects to your accounts, learns how your business actually runs, and shows you the impact of every decision before you make it. No spreadsheets. No finance degree. Set up in minutes.

Connects to Xero, QuickBooks & Sage

Your first forward view today

UK-based, GDPR compliant

Cash forward view

Next 12 months · updated 4 minutes ago

Synced with Xero

Cash at bank

£84,200

Verified history

Burn rate

£6,300/mo

March · projected

Cash runway

14 months

+2 since last month

Clue · MarchCash dips to £31.9k if the January hire goes ahead.

Signal · marketSterling is down 3%.

Verified historyProjected
Illustrative figures

Every business has a few open cases

CaseThe client you're weighing up.
CaseThe hire you're debating.
CaseThe price rise you keep putting off.
CaseThe supplier you rely on a little too much.
CaseThe funding routes you're comparing.
CaseThe office you might not need.
CaseThe quiet quarter you can feel coming.

Plugs straight into the tools you already run on

Xero
QuickBooks
Sage
Stripe
Companies House

The trouble with hindsight

Your accounts tell you what already happened. Not what's about to.

You're carrying the day-to-day and the strategy at the same time, with numbers that are scattered, aged, or a month too slow. By the time the books show the problem, the moment to fix it has gone.

sherloc gives you the clues while they're still warm.

01

Costs move faster

Suppliers reprice mid-contract. Energy, rent and wages rarely move in your favour.

02

Demand wobbles

One big client goes quiet and the whole quarter changes shape.

03

Cash tightens

Profit on paper, nothing in the account. The gap shows up at the worst possible time.

04

Risk shows up early

The warning signs are there months ahead. Nobody has time to watch for them.

How it works

Elementary, really. Three steps to your forward view.

No pivot tables to build and calculations to double-check. sherloc does the heavy lifting from the data you already have.

1

Connect your accounts

Link Xero, QuickBooks or Sage Cloud in a couple of clicks. sherloc pulls your verified history and keeps it in sync.

About 2 minutes

2

Tell it how you run

Your team, how you make money, what you spend, how you're funded. Plain questions, answered in minutes. That's your business data and it's what makes the plan yours.

From 20 minutes

3

See your forward view

Your cash runway, success metrics, ratios - live and kept current as the real numbers land. Test any decision before you commit.

Then it's yours, every day

What-if scenarioIllustrative figures

Test your next move before you make it.

Meet a solid business that has £473k in the bank and a good year pencilled in. Let's test a few decisions and watch what they do to the year ahead.

Let's hire four people.

March. £42,000 a month, fully loaded. Everyone's stretched and this feels overdue.

So we put prices up 8%.

From May. Assumes you keep 95% of clients, which is typical for a modest rise.

Then the biggest client walks.

July. £65,000 a month out the door, with a polite email and no warning.

Quick, a £300k loan.

Lands in August, repaid over 18 months. It helps. It doesn't fix it.

Back in March, you'd have seen it coming.

One client was carrying the hires. This is what sherloc does with your real numbers, every day: months of warning, not weeks.

Get sherloc
Scroll or click to play the year

Illustrative figures for a made-up company. Yours would come from your accounts and how your business runs.

Cash at bank

£491k

Lowest point · Jan

Year end cash

£626k

December, against £626k baseline

JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec£0k£200k£400k£600k£800kSAFE FLOOR £200k4 HIRESPRICES +8%CLIENT LOST£300K LOAN

Latest snapshot

Cash at bank stays above the £200k floor all year. Lowest point £491k in Jan. Year end £626k, in line with the baseline.

What's in the kit

Everything a sharp operator needs. No deerstalker required.

Built for people who run businesses, not spreadsheet hobbyists. Every feature answers one question: what should I do next?

Forward view

See what's ahead, not just what's happened. Cash, revenue and costs, projected month by month from your real history.

What-ifs and comparison

Try a decision without living with it. Line up the paths side by side and see which one you can afford.

Active tracking

Your forward view picks up the real figures as they land each month. The plan stays live, so you never work from a stale one.

Financial metrics

Investor-ready, lender-ready numbers, calculated for you and explained in plain business language.

Reporting

A monthly report your board, bank or accountant will actually read, built automatically from the same truth.

External signals

Currency moves, macro trends and commodity prices, in front of you so you can see how they touch your business.

Also in the box:

Marketplace of SME partners
Finance jargon, translated
Tools to help your business grow
Explore the product →

Who it's for

Built for British businesses that are already trading.

Typically £200k to £10m in revenue, and any SME at the stage where every decision matters, every pound has a job, and every misstep costs time you don't have.

"You don't need a finance degree. You need to know whether you can afford the hire."

The question sherloc was built to answer

Advisor, accountant or investor working with SMEs? See sherloc for partners →

Minutes

from connecting your accounts to your first forward view

12 months

ahead, kept live as the real numbers land

One truth

shared by you, your accountant, your lender and your investors

Zero

pivots to build, maintain or apologise for

Trust & security

Your data stays yours.

Your access stays in your hands and your payments are handled safely. We're built for regulated partners, so we hold ourselves to their standard.

GDPR compliant

Your data is processed lawfully, and only for you.

UK-based

A London company, hosted and supported in the UK.

Fintech-grade security

Encrypted in transit and at rest. Read-only accounting access.

Built for regulated partners

Banks, lenders and accountancy networks already rely on it.

sherloc already works with leading UK partners to help you and your business.

The sherloc Baker Street Club

Good company for people who run companies.

We're building the UK's biggest community for SMEs and the people who support them. No application. No secret handshake. Just join.

  • Events and programmes, online and in person
  • Founder-first support from people who've done it
  • Early access to what we're building next
Free, forever. We'll only write when there's something worth reading.

Start today

The game is afoot. Your numbers already know it.

Connect your accounts and see your forward view before the kettle's boiled. Quick to start, cancel whenever you like.

Get sherloc

Payments via Stripe · Works with Xero, QuickBooks and Sage Cloud