reviewed [Suggestion] Financial Status Description

[Butlee]

A club's Financial Status [Club Menu > General] seems entirely based on their Cash-At-Bank number, and it's honestly really outdated - both in a 2018 financial reviewing state and also just by the way the various leagues' economies work within FM.

Most clubs run at a loss on a month-to-month basis and get 'topped up' by end-of-season and pre-season injections (prizemoney, season tickets, sponsors etc..), so a simple snapshot of cash-at-bank doesn't really ever properly explain how the club is holding together. 
Also the Financial Status markers (Okay, Secure, Rich etc..) are based on set numbers no matter how what club you are. So let's say "Rich" is 30M Euros in the bank - it'll be rare for any English League One sides to ever be rich. Maybe that's ok.

The main reason I think Financial Status is used by managers (correct me if I'm wrong) is in deciding if you're interested in signing with a certain club. You don't want to join someone who's going to be in debt within a couple of months and if you're looking to grow the club you want to make sure they actually have the means to invest in some improvements. Considering a lot of interviews these days talk about "Are you able to manage finances" as well, I think this Financial Status is the only place where you get any idea of how the club sits.

I'm just looking at my current save (Juventus) in January, and how we're "Rich" with 33M Euros in the bank, but we're losing 20M per month. We'll be 100M in debt by EoS - we may well make that up, but right now if someone were looking to take this job on they'd think "Oh Juve is Rich, I could sign there and try to get them to improve their facilities" - and that's simply not the case.
 

Proposal / Solution:

Really I think the naming should just change to represent cashflow a little more*. It'll sound a little complex, but it's really not.
For example let's say (something simple like) an average of the past 3 months Profit/Loss is what gives us our 'Cashflow' amount. Then compare the Cashflow with the Cash-at-Bank amount and pick a financial status based upon that relationship. Such as:

Rich - >75M in the bank and unlikely to be below 0 within 12 months.
Strong - >40M in the bank and unlikely to be below 0 within 12 months.
Good - >15M in the bank, unlikely to be below 0 within 12 months.

And so on for Okay, Secure, Insecure, and any other things.

Alternately you could separate Financial Status and Cashflow Status into 3 headers on the General Club Info page and just have "Strong" represent positive cashflow, "Adequate" represent a slow loss and "Weak" represent a significant loss each period - whether the significant is quantified by a static amount (lets say >10M p/m) or as a portion of the Cash-At-Bank I'm not really sure.
With this breakdown you can at least get more of an idea of how much money the club has and how likely that is to change in the short-to-mid term. 

 

*The projections are fairly week - they seem to just take the prior months income/expense and forecast it out over time. So you could use these for this purpose, but they'd need to be improved. A 3-month rolling average used to extrapolate their position would be stronger.

[Neil Brock]

Reviewed so locked.