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A cash flow analysis is one of the most significant ways a business can use to analyze inflows and outflows.
Why?
Well, this analysis shows what your business does with income. Besides, it can help you streamline internal operations and make data-backed decisions.
Analyzing cash flow does not have to be time-consuming and complex. Yes, you read that right.
Google Sheets lacks ready-made charts for analyzing cash flow. You don’t have to ditch your Google Sheets in favor of other costly tools in the market.
You can improve your Google Sheets by installing third-party apps (add-ons) to access ready-made and visually appealing charts for analyzing cash flow. This will enable you to access ready-made and easy-to-use charts for survey data visualization.
In this blog, you’ll learn:
Before jumping into the blog’s core, we’ll address the following question: what is cash flow analysis?
Definition: A cash flow statement summarizes the amount of cash and cash equivalents entering and leaving your business.
Besides, it measures how well your business is managing its cash position. Or how efficiently your business meets its debt obligations and funds its operating expenses.
Analyzing cash flow complements the balance sheet and income statement and is a mandatory part of a company’s financial reports.
Remember, a cash flow statement is just a table with figures. Imagine analyzing cash flow statements dating back, let’s say, two previous financial years. The table would likely be long and intimidating due to the volume of data.
This means for you to extract actionable insights from your cash flow statement, you have to use charts and graphs.
This is where a visualization related to cash flow comes in.
Like we said earlier, if your visualization tool lacks an inbuilt visualization for Cash Flow Analysis, worry not.
In a moment, we’ll be discussing an easy-to-use method you can use to visualize your financial data.
Like the Balance Sheet, the Cash Flow/Funds flow Diagram provides information on the financial health of your business.
More so, it’s the go-to piece of information for investors with intentions to increase their equity in your business.
So, what’s Cash Flow?
Cash flow is the net amount of cash and cash equivalents going in and out of your business.
It’s made up of two key components: cash received and spent.
Cash received represents inflows, while money spent represents outflows. Your business’s ability to create value for investors is fundamentally determined by its ability to generate positive free cash flows.
Free Cash Flow is the cash your business generates from its operations after deducting capital expenditures.
In the coming section, we’ll address the following question: why is cash flow analysis important?
As we said, analyzing cash flow is an essential element of your financial analysis.
This implies you need a proper and easy-to-interpret Cash Flow forecast in Google Sheets to go beyond the surface of your data and uncover hidden insights. Visualizing your cash flow data requires specialized charts specifically designed for this job.
However, popular spreadsheet tools, such as Google Sheets, lack this chart.
This is where a Cash Flow generator comes in.
In the ensuing section, we’ll address the basics of analyzing the cash flow.
Analyzing cash flow requires you to generate the following statements namely operating, investing, and financing cash flow.
Cash from operating activities represents money received from customers less the amount spent on operating expenses. Investing activities reflect funds spent on fixed assets and financial instruments.
Also, they’re long-term and include properties and assets in a plant or the purchase of stock or securities of another company.
Keep reading because, in the coming section, we’ll address how to perform cash flow analysis.
Google Sheets is a trusted data visualization tool because it’s familiar and has been there for decades.
But the spreadsheet application lacks ready-made charts for analyzing cash flow also known as a funds flow diagram.
We understand switching tools is not an easy task.
This is why we’re not advocating you ditch Google Sheets in favor of other expensive data visualization tools.
There’s an easy-to-use and amazingly affordable visualization tool that comes as an add-in you can easily install in your Google Sheets with ready-made graphs for cash flow analysis. The tool is called ChartExpo.
So, what is ChartExpo?
ChartExpo is an incredibly intuitive add-on you can easily install in your Google Sheets without watching hours of YouTube tutorials.
With many ready-to-go visualizations, ChartExpo turns your complex, raw data into insightful charts for analyzing cash flow that tells the data stories in real-time.
In the coming section, we’ll take you through how to make a Sankey diagram in your Google Sheets.
You don’t want to miss this!
This section will use a Sankey Diagram to visualize the tabular data below.
| Revenue | Revenue Detail | Expenditure | Expenditure Detail | Outflows | Count |
| Taxes | Revenue Detail | Expenditure | Expenditure Detail | Health | 18.4 |
| Taxes | Revenue Detail | Expenditure | Expenditure Detail | Education | 7.3 |
| Taxes | Revenue Detail | Expenditure | Expenditure Detail | Adv Education | 5.2 |
| Resource Royalties | Revenue Detail | Expenditure | Expenditure Detail | Human Services | 4.2 |
| Investment Income | Revenue Detail | Expenditure | Expenditure Detail | Treasury Board | 1.4 |
| Federal Transfers | Revenue Detail | Expenditure | Expenditure Detail | Justice | 1.3 |
| Other Revenue | Revenue Detail | Expenditure | Expenditure Detail | Other Ministries | 5.2 |
To install ChartExpo, an add-in for Google Sheets, click this link.
You can also use the ChartExpo add-on for Excel to create Sankey Diagram in Excel for analyzing cash flow.
In the following video, you will learn how to analyze Cash Flow in Google Sheets with the help of a video tutorial.
You can also use ChartExpo to Cash Flow Diagram in Excel for analyzing cash flow.
Cash Flow analysis is visually representing the money coming in and out of your business in a specified time. Use these charts to extract actionable, in-depth insights into your financial data without wasting time.
Data visualization experts recommend Sankey Diagram as your go-to visualization design.
A cash flow summarizes the amount of cash and cash equivalents entering and leaving your business.
Besides, it measures how well your business is managing its cash position. Or how efficiently your business meets its debt obligations and funds its operating expenses.
Analyzing cash flow complements the balance sheet and income statement.
The cash flows analysis presents sources and uses of money in your business. Besides, it measures how well your business is managing its cash position.
There’re three unique formulas you can use to determine the cash flow position of your business. And they include:
A cash flow analysis is one of the most significant ways a business can use to analyze inflows and outflows.
Why?
Well, this analysis shows what your business does with income. Besides, it can help you streamline internal operations and make data-backed decisions.
Analyzing cash flow does not have to be time-consuming and complex. Yes, you read that right.
Google Sheets lacks ready-made charts for analyzing cash flow.
You don’t have to ditch your Google Sheets in favor of other costly tools in the market.
So, what’s the solution?
We recommend you install third-party apps, such as ChartExpo, to access ready-to-use charts for analyzing cash flow.
ChartExpo is an add-on for Google Sheets that’s loaded with insightful and ready-to-go graphs for analyzing cash flow. You don’t need programming or coding skills to use ChartExpo.
More benefits
Sign up for a 7-day free trial today to access ready-made visualization for cash flow analysis that is easy to interpret and visually appealing to your target audience.
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