Comparison
bluprnts vs Futrli
Futrli, owned by Sage, predicts your cash flow by analysing the transactions in your Xero, QuickBooks or Sage ledger, and turns that into daily forecasts and three-way statements. bluprnts derives the same statements from your operational drivers instead, with no ledger required. Pick Futrli for automatic short-term prediction on a trading business with clean books; pick bluprnts when you need to model a plan rather than predict a pattern.
Choose Futrli if…
Pick Futrli if you are trading, your books are current, and the question is what happens to cash over the next few weeks and months. Its prediction engine reads your real invoices, bills and payment behaviour, which is information a driver-based model does not have and cannot invent. Pick it too if you are an accounting practice wanting one tool across many clients, or if you are already committed to Sage.
Choose bluprnts if…
Pick bluprnts when there is no transaction history to predict from, or when the thing you care about is not a continuation of the pattern. Prediction is a strength when the future resembles the recorded past and a weakness when it does not. If you are pre-revenue, launching something new, or deciding whether to hire, raise or expand, you need those things to be inputs to the model rather than events the ledger has not seen yet.
What Futrli does well
- Automatic prediction is genuinely good. Futrli analyses your actual ledger transactions and payment behaviour to predict what is coming, including VAT, with confidence indicators. You get a useful forecast quickly without describing your business first.
- Daily granularity. For a business managing a tight cash position week to week, a daily view built from real invoices and bills is more useful than a monthly model.
- Deep reporting: a large library of templates, drag-and-drop management reporting, and customisable dashboards mixing financial and non-financial metrics.
- Built for advisory practices, with unlimited users and practice tiers, so a firm can run many client forecasts.
- Backed by Sage, and a natural fit if your accounting already sits in the Sage ecosystem.
Side by side
| bluprnts | Futrli | |
|---|---|---|
| How the forecast is builtPrediction from history against modelling from decisions. | From drivers you set: products, prices, sales, people, costs, financing. | By analysing transactions in your connected ledger to predict what is coming. |
| Works before you have accounting data | Yes. A complete forecast with nothing connected. | No. Its prediction engine needs ledger history to read. |
| Three-way forecast | Yes, derived from the drivers. | Yes, generated from ledger data. |
| GranularityBuilt for different questions: the next fortnight, against the next five years. | Monthly, quarterly and yearly across a five-year horizon. | Daily, which is stronger for near-term cash management. |
| Scenario planning | Levers on the live base model: volume, price, costs, headcount, payment timing, funding. | Multiple scenarios you can create and compare. |
| Management reporting templatesDocuments that argue a case, against a library of report templates. | Investor, lender and board reports built from the live model, with an assumptions register. | Large library, drag-and-drop editor, shareable dashboards. |
| Accessible without accounting knowledgeA frequent theme in user reviews rather than a claim of ours. | Inputs are operational: what you sell, who you employ, what you spend. | Reviewers note it is easiest in the hands of an accountant. |
| Project-level forecasting | Yes, as a layer on the base plan with its own economics. | Not a primary use case. |
Prediction and modelling are not the same thing#
Futrli's core idea is prediction. It reads the transactions in your ledger, learns how your customers actually pay and when your costs actually land, and projects that forward, down to the day. When your books are current and your business is trading in a recognisable pattern, this is powerful and it takes almost nothing from you to set up.
bluprnts does not predict. It calculates. You describe the business as a set of drivers and it derives the statements from them. That is more work up front and it buys a different capability: the model can describe a business that has never traded, and it can describe a version of your business that does not exist yet.
The near term and the medium term#
There is a fairly clean split by horizon. Over the next few weeks, the most accurate information about your cash is sitting in your ledger: the invoices raised, the bills due, the way a particular customer has always paid. A tool reading that will beat a model every time. Over the next year or three, the ledger has much less to say, because the things that will move your cash are decisions nobody has made yet.
A note on who does the driving#
Futrli is at its best in the hands of an accountant, and its practice tiers are built on that assumption. It is a reasonable design: an advisor sets the forecast up and takes the client through it. bluprnts is built on the opposite assumption, that the person running the business should be able to build and change the model themselves, because the inputs are things they already decide. Neither is the correct answer in general. It depends whether you have an advisor and whether you want to depend on one.
Common questions
- Can I forecast cash flow without connecting Xero or QuickBooks?
Yes. Most cash flow forecasting tools require a connected ledger because they work by projecting your accounting history forward — with no history, they have nothing to extrapolate from. bluprnts works the other way round: the forecast is built from your operational drivers, so it works before you have books at all, which matters if you are pre-revenue, launching a new product, or modelling a business that does not exist yet.
Xero can be connected if you want it. It pulls in real actuals so you can check the forecast against what actually happened — an optional input for grounding the model, not the engine that produces it.
- How do I forecast cash flow if I'm not an accountant?
Build the forecast from the things you already know about your business rather than from accounting statements. You know what you sell and for how much, who is on the payroll, what your fixed costs are, and what you expect to sell next quarter. Those are the inputs. The profit and loss, balance sheet and cash flow statement are outputs — they should be calculated for you, not filled in by you.
This is what "driver-based" forecasting means, and it is the approach bluprnts takes. You describe products, people, sales, costs and financing in plain business terms, and the three financial statements, your runway and your breakeven point are derived from them.