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Saturday, 10/21/2017 3:59:42 AM

Saturday, October 21, 2017 3:59:42 AM

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The Essentials Of Corporate Cash Flow
If a company reports earnings of $1 billion, does this mean it has this amount of cash in the bank? Not necessarily. Financial statements are based on accrual accounting, which takes into account non-cash items. It does this in an effort to best reflect the financial health of a company. However, accrual accounting may create accounting noise, which sometimes needs to be tuned out so that its clear how much actual cash a company is generating. The statement of cash flow provides this information, and here we look at what cash flow is and how to read the cash flow statement.

What Is Cash Flow?
Business is all about trade, the exchange of value between two or more parties, and cash is the asset needed for participation in the economic system. For this reason - while some industries are more cash intensive than others - no business can survive in the long run without generating positive cash flow per share for its shareholders. To have a positive cash flow, the companys long-term cash inflows need to exceed its long-term cash outflows. (For more, see What Is Money?)

An outflow of cash occurs when a company transfers funds to another party (either physically or electronically). Such a transfer could be made to pay for employees, suppliers and creditors, or to purchase long-term assets and investments, or even pay for legal expenses and lawsuit settlements. It is important to note that legal transfers of value through debt - a purchase made on credit - is not recorded as a cash outflow until the money actually leaves the companys hands.

A cash inflow is of course the exact opposite; it is any transfer of money that comes into the companys possession. Typically, the majority of a companys cash inflows are from customers, lenders (such as banks or bondholders) and investors who purchase company equity from the company. Occasionally cash flows come from sources like legal settlements or the sale of company real estate or equipment.

Cash Flow vs Income
It is important to note the distinction between being profitable and having positive cash flow transactions: just because a company is bringing in cash does not mean it is making a profit (and vice versa).

For example, say a manufacturing company is experiencing low product demand and therefore decides to sell off half its factory equipment at liquidation prices. It will receive cash from the buyer for the used equipment, but the manufacturing company is definitely losing money on the sale: it would prefer to use the equipment to manufacture products and earn an operating profit. But since it cannot, the next best option is to sell off the equipment at prices much lower than the company paid for it. In the year that it sold the equipment, the company would end up with a strong positive cash flow, but its current and future earnings potential would be fairly bleak. Because cash flow can be positive while profitability is negative, investors should analyze income statements as well as cash flow statements, not just one or the other.

What Is the Cash Flow Statement?
There are three important parts of a companys financial statements: the balance sheet, the income statement and the cash flow statement. The balance sheet gives a one-time snapshot of a companys assets and liabilities (see Reading the Balance Sheet). And the income statement indicates the businesss profitability during a certain period (see Understanding The Income Statement).
The cash flow statement differs from these other financial statements because it acts as a kind of corporate checkbook that reconciles the other two statements. Simply put, the cash flow statement records the companys cash transactions (the inflows and outflows) during the given period. It shows whether all those lovely revenues booked on the income statement have actually been collected. At the same time, however, remember that the cash flow does not necessarily show all the companys expenses: not all expenses the company accrues have to be paid right away. So even though the company may have incurred liabilities it must eventually pay, expenses are not recorded as a cash outflow until they are paid (see the section What Cash Flow Doesnt Tell Us below).

The following is a list of the various areas of the cash flow statement and what they mean:
• Cash flow from operating activities - This section measures the cash used or provided by a companys normal operations. It shows the companys ability to generate consistently positive cash flow from operations. Think of normal operations as the core business of the company. For example, Microsofts normal operating activity is selling software.
• Cash flows from investing activities - This area lists all the cash used or provided by the purchase and sale of income-producing assets. If Microsoft, again our example, bought or sold companies for a profit or loss, the resulting figures would be included in this section of the cash flow statement.
• Cash flows from financing activities - This section measures the flow of cash between a firm and its owners and creditors. Negative numbers can mean the company is servicing debt but can also mean the company is making dividend payments and stock repurchases, which investors might be glad to see.

When you look at a cash flow statement, the first thing you should look at is the bottom line item that says something like net increase/decrease in cash and cash equivalents, since this line reports the overall change in the companys cash and its equivalents (the assets that can be immediately converted into cash) over the last period. If you check under current assets on the balance sheet, you will find cash and cash equivalents (CCE or CC

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