A 13-Week Cash Flow Forecast for Private Clubs: Getting Through the Pre-Season Trough

Every September we have some version of the same conversation with a club treasurer. The audited financials look fine. The balance sheet showed seven figures of cash at fiscal year-end. And yet the operating account is going to get uncomfortably thin somewhere around the third week of October, because the clubhouse project has two more contractor draws before season, F&B starts pre-season hiring in three weeks, and the annual dues billing that goes out October 1 will not turn into collected cash until the second week of November. Nobody did anything wrong. The club is solvent. The calendar is the problem.

A monthly forecast cannot see any of this, which is why we push seasonal clubs toward the same instrument restaurant groups and turnaround CFOs have used for decades: a 13-week cash flow forecast, run weekly. The club version is a different animal from the restaurant version, though, because clubs misread their cash for the opposite reason.

Clubs break the cash intuition in the other direction

A restaurant collects money every morning and gets surprised by lumpy outflows. A club collects money once or twice a year and gets surprised by the drain in between. The CMAA and Club Benchmarking 2024 Club Finance and Operations Survey — data from more than 1,200 clubs, reported in CMAA's January 2026 Board Brief — puts dues at roughly half of operating revenue for golf clubs. When half your revenue arrives in one or two billing events, your operating account is at its fattest the week after billing and drains steadily for the next nine to ten months.

That shape produces the misreading we see most often in board rooms: a director looks at the January bank balance and concludes the club is flush. But January cash at an annually-billed club is the fuel for eleven months of operations you have already promised to deliver, and most of it is spoken for. The number worth tracking is cash net of the unearned dues obligation. A club holding $2.4 million the week after billing, with $1.8 million of it representing dues collected for services not yet rendered, has $600,000 of actual cushion — and that is the number that has to carry the summer project and the fall ramp. Very few monthly board packages show it. Ours do, as a single line under the cash balance, and it changes the tone of the conversation immediately.

Where the trough actually forms

The pre-season trough is not new, but it is deeper than it used to be, for a reason most treasurers have not connected to their bank account. The same CMAA survey data shows capital income at mid-sized clubs up 104 to 125 percent since 2019. Clubs are running far larger capital projects than their treasuries were built around, and construction draws follow the contractor's schedule of values, not the dues calendar. A renovation that started in May will present its largest draws in September and October — precisely when the operating account hits its annual low. Add pre-season payroll (made earlier and more expensive this year by the H-2B allocation being cut roughly in half for FY2026, per CMAA), Florida property insurance premiums, and a property tax bill landing in November, and you get three or four heavy disbursement weeks stacked directly on the leanest stretch of the year.

Monthly forecasting averages this away. October as a month may net out fine; the fourth week of October is the problem, because that is where the draw, the payroll, and the premium happen to share seven days. Weekly buckets are the entire point of the exercise. Thirteen weeks — one quarter — started at Labor Day reaches into mid-November, which is far enough to see the dues collections arrive and confirm the trough closes.

The version you can build Thursday afternoon

You do not need software or a consultant for the first version. You need last year's bank statements and about ninety minutes. Six rows, thirteen weekly columns: opening cash, member receipts, payroll by pay date, construction draws from the schedule of values, debt service, and everything else bucketed weekly from twelve months of bank activity. Bank data, not the general ledger — the ledger tells you what you earned and owe, the bank tells you when money moves, and only the second one makes payroll.

The one line people get wrong is member receipts. Do not forecast collections from due dates. Pull last year's weekly deposit history and forecast this year's collections as the same weekly percentages of total billing. Member payment behavior is remarkably stable cohort to cohort: roughly the same share pays in the first two weeks, the same long tail straggles into January. Last year's curve is a better predictor than any aging policy you have on paper, and it will tell you honestly that an October 1 billing is perhaps 15 percent cash by October 31 — not the 60 percent an optimistic budget assumes.

When you can skip this

Not every club needs it. A city or athletic club billing dues monthly, with no debt, no active capital project, and a cash floor that never dips below about three months of operating expenses has a naturally smooth calendar; a monthly forecast serves it fine, and a weekly model would be maintenance without payoff. The 13-week discipline earns its 45 minutes a week only where the calendar can actually hurt you: annual or semiannual dues billing, a construction draw schedule, seasonal payroll, or debt covenants tested off cash.

What we'd advise

If your club bills annually and has a project underway, build the model this month and run it every Monday through February. Then read one number: the lowest projected weekly balance between now and dues collections. If that week's balance clears one full payroll cycle plus the month's debt service, you have a calendar, not a problem. If it does not, act in September, while the options are cheap — resequence the final two draws with your contractor, move a discretionary purchase past billing, or put a seasonal line of credit in place. A line negotiated in September, with a model that shows the lender exactly which week it gets repaid, costs a conversation. The same line requested the week you need it costs credibility, and boards spend years earning that back. The trough is coming either way; the only question is whether you meet it with a plan.

Visions Alliance provides fractional CFO leadership to private clubs, hospitality businesses, and owner-led companies across South Florida.