Category Archives: Projected Cash Flow

Important Cash Flow Vocabulary

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These words put some people off because they sound like accounting and financial analysis. But they’re good terms to know, especially if you’re running a business. This is important cash flow vocabulary.

  • Cash in business planning and financial projections is not coins and bills. It’s liquidity, money in checking and other instantly available accounts; money you have and you can spend.
  • Cash sales include sales by real cash, bills and coins; plus sales paid by check or credit cards. In financial projections, sales are either cash or on credit (below).
  • Sales on credit isn’t about credit cards, but rather the common practice of businesses selling to other businesses, and sometimes businesses selling to consumers. It’s also called sales on account. It refers to when a business delivers the goods and services to a business customer along with an invoice that will be paid later, not immediately. The amount involved is considered Accounts Receivable for the seller, and Accounts Payable for the buyer.
  • simple collection days formulaCollection days is how many days, on average, a business waits for customers to pay their invoices. The unit is days, so 30 is about a month and 90 about three months. Accountants and analysts calculate average collection days for a business by multiplying 365 times times the average receivables balance and dividing that by annual sales on credit. And this is often called Collection Period.
  • Receivables is short for Accounts Receivable, which is money owed to a business. It may include some outstanding loans to employees, for example, and some other items; but the bulk of Accounts Receivable, and analysis of Accounts Receivable, is amount owed to a business by customers who haven’t paid yet.
  • Accounts Payable is money a business owes. When your business customers haven’t paid you, what is accounts receivable to you is accounts payable to them.
  • Payment days is how many days, on average, a business waits before paying its invoices. The unit is days, so 30 is about a month and 90 is about three months. In many ways it’s just the other side of the coin of collection days. If I’m your customer, then my payment days figure into your collection days. However, the formulas for payment days are harder to deal with than for collection days, because standard accounting keeps much closer track of sales on credit than new entries to accounts payable, and new accounts payable is not an obvious concept. So I’m defining it with this illustration:new-payablespayment days formulaTotal New Payables for a year would be the sum of all the monthly entries in the bottom row of the illustration above. So once you get that number for total new payables, you can then calculate payment days with a formula similar to the one for collection days: multiply the average payables balance by 365, and divide that product by the total new payables for the year.
  • Inventory is goods and materials that you’ve purchased and you keep until you sell it to customers. That could be materials you’re going to assemble into something, or products you’re going to sell. Inventory is an asset. It doesn’t become a cost until you sell it. Therefore it doesn’t show up on the profit and loss statement until you sell it. But you may have already paid for it by the time you sell it.
  • inventory turnover formulaInventory Turnover is a measurement of how much inventory you have on hand. Inventory on hand tends to be a drain on working capital because you pay for it before you sell it. The higher the turnover, the less inventory is sitting in your business waiting to get sold, and the better for cash flow. Analysts talk about “turns,” so that if your average inventory is equivalent to a year’s worth of sales, that’s one turn. Businesses aim for 10, 20, or more turns. Calculate inventory turnover by dividing your cost of goods sold by your average inventory balance.

Word of warning:

Unfortunately, even with financial analysts and accountants as literal as they are, with their insistence on things being exactly correct, there are different ways to calculate some of these numbers. And, to make matters worse, many of them calculate a number one way and don’t realize that there is more than one way. For example:

  • Many of them use the number 360 in these calculations instead of 365
  • Many of them use ending balance for these calculations instead of average balance.
  • Many of them calculate payment days using cost of goods sold instead of new payables.

And other discrepancies will turn up. Don’t take them too seriously when they say that one of these calculations are wrong. It’s just different.

How to Project Cash Flow

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LivePlan Users Click HereA good cash flow analysis might be the most important single piece of a business plan. All the strategy, tactics, and ongoing business activities mean nothing if there isn’t enough money to pay the bills. And that’s what a cash flow projection is about – predicting your money needs in advance. profits-vs-cash-small

The Projected Cash Flow is what links the other two of the three essential projections, the Projected Profit and Loss and Projected Balance Sheet, together. The cash flow completes the system. It reconciles the Profit and Loss with the Balance.

We do the lean plan with a discussion of cash traps instead of the full detail of the cash flow analysis. That might be enough for the lean plan, but eventually you’ll want to build a real cash plan, using real numbers, and real financial math.

Experts can be annoying. There are several ways to do a cash flow plan. Sometimes it seems like as soon as you use one method, somebody who is supposed to know tells you you’ve done it wrong. Often that means that expert doesn’t know enough to realize there is more than one way to do it.

Direct Cash Flow

So here is a direct cash flow plan. You can see the potential complications and the need for linking up the numbers from the other statements. Your estimated receipts from accounts receivable must have a logical relationship to sales and the balance of accounts receivable. Likewise, your payments of accounts payable have to relate to the balances of payables and the costs and expenses that created the payables. Vital as this is to business survival, it is not nearly as intuitive as the sales forecast, personnel plan, or income statement. The mathematics and the financial projections are more complex.

Here’s Garrett’s Projected Cash Flow for the bicycle shop, so you can see how that works:

Sample Projected Cash Flow

Estimating Receipts from Receivables

The first two rows of Garrett’s cash flow projection depend on detailed estimates of money coming in as his customers on account pay their invoices. To estimate that, he lays out his guess based on the assumption that only 10% of his sales are on credit (on account), and that his customers pay their invoices in about one month on average. That estimate looks like this:

cycle-shop-receivables-analysis

In this case, the sales on credit are 10% of the estimated total sales in the Sales Forecast, $26,630. That’s the result of Garrett’s assumption, based on the nature of his business. And the money involved comes in one month later. This worksheet projects the Accounts Receivable value in Garrett’s Projected Balance Sheet, as well as the Received from AR value in the Projected Cash Flow. The receivables analysis depends on information in the Profit and Loss Projection, plus an assumption about Sales on Credit, and another on waiting time before payment. And it affects the Projected Balance and the Projected Cash Flow, as shown in this next illustration:

Showing Links in Assumptions for Receivables

Estimating the Impact of Inventory

Inventory presents another set of important cash-related assumptions. I explained earlier that in the case of inventory, proper accounting practices require special details. The cost of inventory that shows up in the Projected Profit and Loss is related to timing of sales. The actual cash flow implications of inventory depend on when new inventory is purchased, as shown here:

sample-inventory-cash-analysis

As with Accounts Receivable in the previous illustration, the inventory analysis depends on information from the Sales Forecast, and it sends information to both the Projected Balance Sheet (Ending Inventory) and the Projected Cash Flow (Inventory Purchase).

Estimating the Impact of Payables

Most businesses wait a month or so before they pay invoices for goods and services received from other businesses. That means we can save on our cash flow by holding back some money and paying it later. With proper accrual accounting, that money is recorded on the Balance Sheet as Accounts Payable. Estimating Accounts Payable takes a careful combination of calculations and assumptions. First we have to collect the full amount of payments. Then we account for payments made immediately, not held in Accounts Payable. After that, we estimate how long, on average, we hold payments. That analysis is shown below:

In this case, it is assumed that the store will pay its bills about a month after it receives them.

Cash Flow is About Management

Reminder: you should be able to project cash flow using competent educated guesses based on an understanding of the flow in your business of sales, sales on credit, receivables, inventory, and payables. These are useful projections. But real management is minding the projections every month with plan vs. actual analysis so you can catch changes in time to manage them. The illustration here shows projected profits for the bicycle store compared to the projected cash flow, using the projections presented in this chapter:

Profits vs. Cash

 

This chapter continues with Indirect Cash Flow, the next section…

Sources and Uses of Cash Example

Indirect Cash Flow Method

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An alternative cash flow method, called indirect, projects cash flow by starting with net income and adding back depreciation and other non-cash expenses, then accounting for the changes in assets and liabilities that aren’t recorded in the income statement. This one comes from the Sources and Uses of Cash Statement that frequently serves as a surrogate for a Cash Flow in formal financial statements.

Sources and Uses works great for analyzing cash flow after the fact, with past financial statements. It’s a simple way to understand where the money came from and where it went. For example, the following illustration would show the bicycle store Projected Sources and Uses for February of Year 1, with the same numbers shown in the previous section on cash flow and in Chapter 18 on Projecting the Balance Sheet:

Sources and Uses Example

Notice that this seemingly simpler method produces exactly the same cash flow projection as the direct method. When you turn back to the previous and compare it, the direct method involved more than 25 rows of calculations (many with zeros in them) compared to the six rows here.

While this works great after the fact, when you know what happened, there is a catch in using this method for projecting the future: We don’t know whether any given item is a source or a use of cash in any future month. For example, in the bicycle store projections for June of Year 1, both Accounts Receivable and Inventory amounts decreased, so they became a source, not a use, of cash; so the layout has to change for a Sources and Uses cash flow:

Sources and Uses of Cash Example

During my years with financial projections, I’ve developed an alternative to Sources and Uses, also based on the indirect cash flow method, which works better for the ebbs and tides of projected balance amounts over months and years. The following illustration shows how it works:

Sample Indirect Cash Flow Method

Either direct or indirect cash flow methods, when applied correctly, give the same results. I find the direct method, despite having more rows, is generally easier to understand because as you make inputs you are projecting payments or receipts, money going out or coming in, while with the indirect method you project changes in balance amounts.

In fact, for years now, I usually include both methods in my projections, so that the one provides an automatic error check of the other.