Cash flow is the cash that comes in and goes out of your business in any given time frame.
Cash is actual money that has come into your business. For example, if you send an invoice to a client, the amount due is not considered cash until you are paid. Once you receive payment, that becomes part of your cash flow. Until then, it’s known as accounts receivable and not cash in hand… bummer, we know!
If more cash comes into your business than goes out in a time period, you have positive cash flow! If more money goes out than comes in during a certain period, you have negative cash flow.
So is cash flow the same as profit?
Cash flow and profit are not the same thing.
Profit is your business’ financial gain and is calculated by subtracting your cost and expenses from your revenue. What’s (hopefully) left is your profit.
Unlike profit, cash flow is all the cash coming in and going out of your business. While this does include the cost of goods and expenses, cash flow also includes transactions like credit card payments, loan payments, payroll and sales tax liabilities, and owner’s drawers.
So it’s possible to be profitable and have negative cash flow at the same time.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you calculate your profit, and your numbers are:
You have profit, but what if you also have to pay your loans, pay VAT/GST, and pay yourself?
The Cash Flow Statement has some highlights that help you identify positive and negative cash flow. By moving the final cash flow calculations to the top of the page, Futrli has also used conditional formatting on the net cash flow row to identify positive cash flow periods in green (when you are generating more cash than you are spending) and negative cash flow periods (when you are spending more cash than is coming in), in red.
You cannot edit account predictions on this page as it is the final output of every accounting movement, but you can edit account predictions on every other prediction page. To find out about the Prediction pages controls please head to the Sales Prediction page article where every area on the prediction pages are explained.
Export financials
Being able to export your financial data for bank loans, shareholders, or stakeholder reporting is important.
Hit the “Export Financials” button to export a five year view of your data for the P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash flow statement, two years of historical data and three years of forecast/budget data. All Account row reordering and account grouping will be preserved and delivered in expandable groups in the Google Sheets export. Export to Excel, or PDF from Google Sheets.
