A cash flow template in Excel can take many different forms depending on the context. You can get deeper into the view of an Accountant that is looking to produce financial statements or it could be something more informal that is used for real-time cash flow forecasting. Either way, the most requested service I am asked to do is driving down to the cash flow results of various scenarios and business situations.
First, let's talk about the Statement of Cash Flows or the "Cash Flow Statement". This falls into the realm of accounting and fits in with the balance sheet and income statement. I've got cash flow statement templates within all the startup financial models for SaaS / Subscription and general industry models. With those, the user has dynamic inputs they can configure. Based on the high-level inputs for revenues, expenses, capex, debt, potential exit value, payables, receivables (when relevant), inventory, cash collections, and startup costs, the formulas I configured in Excel produce cash flow statements. This is all pro forma work.
In the above templates, you will find offsets, add backs, and all sorts of things to properly identify the cash flow movements of things like customer receipts, accounts receivable / collections, payables for things like inventory, taxes, and more. The income statement will give one view of the financials, but the statement of cash flows is going to give the actual cash movements and proper timing of that. It all takes a good foundation of journal entries and financial categorization to get right.
For example, if you have some cost of goods sold that are calculated based on depreciation, this is a non-cash item that needs to be added back to net income, if that is your starting point for the cash flow statement.
I've done other things that drive down to cash flow. There are real estate models, which I started building first from the view of cash-on-cash return. Those models are highly focused on the initial investment net of any leverage usage and the cash returns per period / exit value.
Another category is joint venture cash flow distribution models. Those focus on figuring out what an LP / GP contribute in terms of equity investment and what the cash distributions are to be for each, often driven by hurdle rates for IRR or a simple non-compounding preferred return that sits above each distribution split.
If you are looking for something that will produce financial statements for historical data, not pro forma statements, I've done a single cash flow statement generator template that has accounting logic coded into the Excel sheet so the user simply enters transactions into a database tab and based on those transactions, the Cash Flow Statement, Income Statement, and Balance Sheet automatically populate (monthly, quarterly, annual).
We can keep going here. Most recently I built a cash flow forecasting Excel template that will show the user their expected daily bank balance for up to 365 days in the future. It runs on the starting bank balance, current date, and then pulls from user-entered invoices for expected payables and receivables.
Article found in Accounting and Finance.
