Cash flow
The Sunday-morning tally, retired.
The near-real-time cash-flow watch the bookkeeping loop fires after you wire it up once — pulling every bank, payments processor, point-of-sale, and inbox ACH into a single balance the operator opens in one tab instead of four. The full wire-once beat is on /how-it-works; the Starter tier is where the cash-flow watch ships first.
The Sunday-morning cash-position reconcile.
There is another tax small operators pay — one the bookkeeping books won’t show on a trial balance, but the operator’s Sunday-morning hours carry all the same. It is paid in four open tabs and a sticky note: the banking tab on the left monitor, the payments processor on the right, the point-of-sale report on the phone, and the bookkeeping spreadsheet in the second browser window — the operator hand-subtracts the authorized holds from the posted balances, ignores the inbox ACH that hasn’t cleared yet, and writes a number on the sticky note stuck to the laptop hinge.
The number is right about eighty percent of the time. The other twenty percent it’s wrong by enough that the line-of-credit cushion gets touched over a phantom float — the ACH the operator missed, the card batch that posted after the spreadsheet was saved, the payroll run the bank tab was still showing as queued. The read is missing the ACH the operator doesn’t remember opens until the second coffee; the ACH the operator does remember opens is the one the bank tab is still treating as pending. The number lands one way at eight and a different way at ten, and the operator finds out which one was right the first time a payables run bounces.
By the next Sunday the operator is reconciling four feeds against one spreadsheet — the bank, the payments processor, the point-of-sale, the inbox — and re-checking each against the per-source truth the bank or the processor showed last Friday, in case a batch moved a number between the spreadsheet save and now. The hours are paid in an unscheduled Sunday, a missed family breakfast, the quiet panic the line-of-credit statement carries when it lands on a Wednesday morning with a higher balance than the operator would have touched if the spreadsheet had been right.
That tax — the one four feeds publish a balance for, the one the bookkeeping books already carry as a line item in the period close, the one the operator reconciles by hand on the Sunday before the books go out — is the one Stillpost built the cash-flow watch to retire. Same four feeds. Same four sources. A read-only connect per source, one wire-up. The per-source balance is folded into the main operating account the operator picks during wire-up, the in-flight ACH is held separately from the posted balance, and the number the operator opens on Monday morning was last refreshed before the staff meeting started. The Sunday before the books go out is the Sunday your CPA closed last night, not the one you will be writing into this morning.
That is the beat. That is the loop. That is what gets handed back.
What the watch does on a fifteen-minute pull.
Three beats the cash-flow watch runs after the wire-up — in the order the loop fires them. Pull, fold, refresh. Each beat folds into the next, and the per-source number the operator opens on Monday is the per-source number the loop is holding right now, not the one the operator wrote onto a sticky note an hour after the spreadsheet saved.
- Step one01/03
Pull the feeds.
A read-only connect per source — the bank through Plaid, Mercury, Stripe, Square, and Brex on the direct connectors, the inbox for the ACH the bank hasn’t cleared yet, the point-of-sale for the card batch that lands tomorrow. One wire-up, four feeds, none of them written back to.
- Step two02/03
Fold them into one position.
Every source posts into the same per-account ledger — the operating account, the reserve, the card-issuer sub-account, whatever the operator wires up. Authorized holds are subtracted from posted balances, the in-flight ACH is held separately, and the result is one number the operator can read at-a-glance.
- Step three03/03
Refresh the watch.
The position is recomputed on a fifteen-minute cadence — bank, processor, point-of-sale, inbox — and the digest the operator opens in the morning was last refreshed before the staff meeting started. The four tabs become one, and the Sunday tally that used to build it is the Sunday the operator spent somewhere else.
What it earns its keep on.
Three returns the cash-flow watch ships, measured the way an operator measures them — the Sunday tally retired, one number not four, the audit trail the operator would have rebuilt on a Sunday afternoon but didn’t have to.
The Sunday tally, retired.
The before-breakfast ritual of opening the banking tab, the payments processor, the POS report, and the bookkeeping spreadsheet to hand-subtract holds from balances is a ritual the loop retired. The Sunday that used to build the number is the Sunday the operator got back.
One number, not four.
The cash position folded across bank, processor, point-of-sale, and inbox ACH — refreshed every fifteen minutes, readable in one tab. The line of credit that used to bridge the gap between the spreadsheet’s number and the day’s number stops getting touched over a phantom float.
An audit trail untouched by hand.
Every pull timestamped, every reconciled line threaded to the source feed the operator picks during wire-up. The CPA who opens the books on Monday sees where the number came from, line by line, without the operator having to rebuild it on a Sunday afternoon.
The five questions operators ask before they wire it up.
Switching banks, near-real-time cadence, what the point-of-sale feed actually reads, Treasurer control, and what a feed-down looks like mid-day — straight answers, before the watch plugs into the four sources the operator already runs on. The FAQPage-structured-data block above carries the same questions in a machine-readable shape Google reads directly.
Do I have to switch banks to wire up the cash-flow watch?
No. The watch reads the bank the operator already uses — through Plaid for the long tail of institutions, and through the direct connectors for Mercury, Stripe, Square, and Brex. The OAuth token lands in the same vault the rest of the app’s tokens sit behind, the loop gets a read-only transaction pull, and the source-of-truth bank stays exactly the way it was before Stillpost touched it. Multi-account setups — operating plus payroll plus reserve, or main plus a card-issuer sub-account — read in parallel and reconcile against the main operating account the operator picks during wire-up. An unsupported bank surfaces as a wire-up blocker rather than a half-built watch, and a note on the contact page routes the blocker to the team within one business day; the rest of the bookkeeping keeps running in the meantime.
How near is near-real-time?
The watch recomputes on a fifteen-minute cadence — long enough that an idle hour at a small operator isn’t paged, short enough that the number the operator opens after lunch reflects the ACH that cleared over the noon meeting and the card batch that posted since the morning pull. The first 06:00 cash-flow pull of the day runs before the operator opens the laptop; the rest of the day the loop keeps refreshing in the background. The cadence isn’t a poll-every-second feed — it’s a deliberate answer to the question "how fresh does this number have to be for the operator to trust it without babysitting it?" The margin-digest cadence and the end-of-period cadence are walked on the small-businesses pillar, and the price frame for which tier carries which cadence lives on the pricing grid.
What does the point-of-sale feed actually read?
The point-of-sale feed is the per-batch settlement the POS posts at end-of-day — the card batch that closed at midnight, the cash drawer that was counted at close, the tips that posted against the batch. Square reads the daily settlement report; Stripe reads the per-day payout; the long-tail POS providers read whatever their connector surfaces as the day-end summary. The watch holds the batch separately from the bank balance until the ACH settles — typically one to two business days for the card networks, occasionally longer on weekends. The audit trail the operator sees on Monday morning shows the per-batch number, the per-day ACH, and the per-day bank reconciliation, threaded by settlement ID so the operator can trace any single penny from card swipe to bank landing.
Do I lose control of the Treasury view?
No. The watch reads every feed the operator wires up; the operator decides which account is the main operating account the rest of the bookkeeping reconciles against; the operator can revoke any connection from the dashboard at any moment and the loop stops using it on the next pull. The Treasury view the operator builds on top of Stillpost — the master cash-flow model, the per-source-of-truth reconciliation, the end-of-period close — stays the operator’s to compose. Stillpost provides a single folded position and per-source line items; the dashboard view the operator runs decisions against is the operator’s.
What happens when a feed goes down mid-day?
The watch logs the failure, holds the previous reading on the affected source, and surfaces it in the next morning digest with the source flagged. The operator opens the dashboard and sees which feed is missing — the rest of the bookkeeping keeps running, and the per-source reconciliation the CPA sees on Monday shows each affected pull as a gap, not a guessed number. When the feed comes back, the loop resumes reads from the last successful pull and reconciles the gap against the source system. No re-keying on the operator’s side, no phantom number in the books — the audit trail shows what was missing and what was held while the feed was offline, and the contact page routes a stuck connection to the team within one business day if a feed stays dark for more than twenty-four hours.
5 questions answered · the per-pillar data flow is on the small-biz pillar, the price frame is on the pricing grid
The next step
Wire the cash-flow watch today, retire the Sunday tally.
Starter carries the cash-flow watch, the overdue chaser, and the nightly receipts reconcile — four feeds folded into one balance, refreshed every fifteen minutes. Pro layers the multi-state sales-tax estimate on top. Managed hands the period close to a human. Three tiers, no surprise implementation fee — pick the one that fits your ops.
Wire it up today.
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