Cash Flow Statement Template | Fillable | Excel
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The purpose of a Cash Flow Statement is to show where your business is getting its cash from, and to where its cash is going. At first glance, a Cash Flow Statement can easily be confused with Profit and Loss Statement – after all, doesn’t money in minus money out equate directly to profit? Not quite. The cash flow statement doesn’t account for non-cash items such as depreciation. It is very possible for a company to have a positive cash flow and to be unprofitable, and for a non-profitable firm to have a positive cash flow.
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There are numerous online sources for Cash Flow Statement Templates. Spreadsheet analysis is ideal for this purpose, so almost all of the templates are designed to be used with them. As Excel is by far the spreadsheet most often employed by business people, most will be designed for use with that program. Within that rather large subset of availability, you will find many more examples in the newer XLSS format than of the now almost obsolete XLS type.
How to Complete a Cash Flow Statement
A typical Cash Flow Statement template will completely document a company’s cash flow for a year. There will be one column to describe each cash source or sink, and 12 additional columns, one for each month, for the numbers and the summaries. There will be one space by itself, where you enter the amount of cash on hand on the morning of January 1st, on any other day that you company starts its business or tax year.
The very first line will be for the cash your company holds on the first day of the month. In the January column, of course, that amount will be identical to the cash availability on the first day of the year.
Underneath that, there will be a legend in the first column stating something to the effect of “Cash Sources”. There will be nothing written in the other columns of this first line.
Directly under “Cash Sources” there will be one line for every possible source your company has for cash. There will be line for Cash Sales for each of the types of items your company sells, such as services and or merchandise. There might be a line for Bank Interest, as well as one for the owner’s Equity Contributions to the firm.
Then, all the Cash Sources will be summarized. This sum is added to the amount described earlier, the amount of cash your company had on hand on the first day of the month. This is the amount of cash your company has at the end of the first month, before the outflows are considered.
To compute those outflows, a similar analysis is done for everything for which your company pays out cash. As in the case for sources, these, too, are summarized. This summary is subtracted from the last amount calculated in the previous section. This is the amount of cash available at the end of the first month.
This amount is automatically transposed to the line available for cash that your company holds on the first day of the second month. And, the analysis continues for the 12-month period.
Cash Flow Statement Templates are also available for word processors, but that would leave all the error prone arithmetic for you to do.
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