Individuals facing large outlays such as a mortgage, childcare or a job change who, when judging whether cash flow holds over coming months, enter income, fixed costs and one-off expenses into a browser tool, simulate month by month, and get a monthly balance curve whose assumptions they can adjust.
Manually listing income and expenses in a spreadsheet and projecting month by month, or using bookkeeping apps that review past transactions; the former is formula-heavy, the latter is backward-looking rather than forward simulation.
Before a large outlay, the low point of the balance over coming months is hard to foresee; hand-building spreadsheet formulas and repeatedly editing assumptions is slow and error-prone, and underestimating a monthly shortfall can force emergency borrowing or disrupt plans.