Cash flow is an important part of any business, and managing it properly is essential for a company’s success. One way you can manage your company’s cash flow is by creating a cash flow statement that will help you track your cash inflows and business expenses.
You can then study this statement to identify any potential issues with your cash flow and also measure the company’s overall liquidity.
This guide aims to provide tips on managing your cash flow and walk you through the steps of filling in a statement template.
Why is it Important for Businesses to Monitor Cash Flow?
Cash flow is an important aspect of business because it is the movement of money in and out of the company. It directly impacts the company’s ability to meet its financial obligations and continue operations.
Without positive cash flow, a company may struggle to pay bills, make payroll, or invest in growth opportunities. Therefore, keeping an eye on cash flow, and understanding how to manage it, as well as using tools to identify the cost of delays and other unexpected events, is crucial for the long-term success and sustainability of any business.
This is why monitoring your cash flow is key to the survival of your company, and you should get started on using a cash flow template as soon as possible.
Essential to Meet Financial Obligations
Each business will have some form of financial obligation. These are expenses that you have a responsibility to pay, such as rent for office spaces, debt repayments, or taxes.
If you haven’t spent time monitoring your cash flow, you could end up in a position where you don’t have enough funds to cover these obligations, which could land you in trouble.
Help Business Owners Identify Potential Cash Shortages
Monitoring your cash flow can help you, as a business owner, identify and preempt cash shortages by tracking the inflow and outflow of funds, allowing for early identification of potential financial issues such as unexpected expenses or delays in receiving payments.
This can help you make informed decisions about investments, expenses, and budgeting to ensure the stability and growth of your business.
Assess The Overall Financial Health of the Business
Spending time monitoring your cash flow can give you a better understanding of the overall health of your business because it allows you to spot patterns in financial performance and adjust your company’s spending accordingly.
Can Help Identify Areas of Improvement
Not only can monitoring your cash flow help with the things mentioned above, but it can also help you to spot potential areas of improvement.
It can help you, as a business owner, make better-informed decisions about the future of your business and ensure that your finances remain stable.
Where Can You Find a Cash Flow Template?
One of the many benefits of Excel is that it allows business owners to quickly and easily create or use a cash flow statement template to help them to visualise the financial performance of the company.
You can create custom Excel spreadsheets online as well as find templates that you can use to input your data. Filling in a cash flow template will involve the following steps.
Begin with the Balance Sheet
In Excel, the first step in creating a cash flow statement template is to enter the balance sheet information. This will include many different types of information relating to your accounts.
The sort of data you may want to input here includes current accounts, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and other important financial data.
This will serve as a foundation for your cash flow statement, and you will then input the rest of the data around this.
Identify Cash Inflows
Next, you will need to identify and enter the various sources of cash inflows. This can include any type of income, but most importantly, it should include continuous income streams that you know are always going to be coming into your business.
This could be income from clients, projected sales, and anything else that will boost your overall funds.
The data should all be as accurate as possible. Otherwise, this data is useless to you, so don’t edit the numbers to make things seem better than they are, as this doesn’t help you improve things.
Identify Cash Outflows
Next, you will need to identify and enter the various sources of cash outflows. This can be one of the more revealing steps when creating your cash flow statement.
You should spend a lot of time going over every single expense that your business faces, from the major ones like office space rent and payroll to software subscriptions and equipment hire.
The data here will give you a good idea of the expenses you can cut from your business to better balance your cash flow.
Calculate Net Cash Flow
Now, with all the information entered into your template, you can calculate the net cash flow for your business.
Using Excel sums and subtracts functions, which are simple functions you can learn via an Excel training course, you can figure out exactly what your net cash flow is.
This will involve subtracting your expenses from your income, which will be displayed in a net cash flow cell. You’re left with this income after paying all the financial obligations mentioned above.
Create Reports
With the help of your cash flow statement template, you can easily create Excel reports that will provide a snapshot of your business’s financial health at any given time. These reports can be invaluable to you as a business owner. They will allow you to easily spot any issues with spending, such as unexpected expenses or delays in receiving payments.
By identifying these issues early on, you can take proactive measures to bring your cash flow back into a state you’re comfortable with and ensure the stability and growth of your business.
How The Excel Experts Can Help With Creating a Custom Cash Flow Statement Template
Our team of Excel experts can help you create a custom cash flow statement template that meets the specific needs of your business.
This custom template could include everything from formulas and calculations that can automatically track and report on your overall cash flow to the design of charts and graphs for easy analysis later on.
Our team can also provide you with training for your team so that everyone is much better prepared to handle this sort of task in the future.
We can help teach your employees to create and manage these templates, reports, graphs and charts, too, which will add significant value to your team.
Summary: Utilising Excel’s Cash Flow Statement Templates
A comprehensive and accurate cash flow statement template is essential for businesses of all sizes.
For a small business, income will likely be much lower, and budgeting will be far more important to ensure the business can make ends meet. And for larger, sprawling corporations, while income might be much higher, overheads will also be higher.
As well as this, there is a much higher chance that a bigger company will have far more risk and volume of unnecessary expenses and will waste far more money than it needs to.
A cash flow statement can help with both examples, allowing for easier budgeting and also the identification and elimination of these pointless expenses.
FAQs
Excel does have some tools to help you create a cash flow statement. However, for those unfamiliar with using Excel and those unfamiliar with cash flow statements generally, they can be somewhat complicated to create.
First, you should start by inputting all of your cash inflows, like your revenue, into one column on the spreadsheet and then all of your outflows in an opposite column. The outflows are your expenses.
You then subtract the outflows from the inflows, and the resulting value will be your net cash flow for that time. You can then use formulas to generate an overall balance for your account.
When preparing your cash flow statement, you must gather your company’s financial information, including cash inflows and outflows.
You can then organise all of this information into a format, as demonstrated by a cash flow statement template which can then calculate and display useful data like cash flow.
Usually, the three main things you’d put on a cash flow statement are general operation costs, investing costs, and financing activities.
Operating costs involve sale income and payments to suppliers. Investing activities will involve the money you spend on investing in stocks, real estate, or other things in trading markets.
And finally, financing activities involve any funds you receive from stocks, bonds, dividends, or money you pay to settle debts.
