Understanding your business’s cash flow can be the difference between success and failure, which is why many business owners painstakingly record their cash flow or hire someone to do it for them.
Cash flow templates in Google Sheets can be an invaluable tool for this. They provide a structured and organized approach to monitoring your cash flow, identifying trends, and making informed financial decisions.
In this cash flow template Google Sheets guide, we will explore various cash flow templates available, highlighting their features. We’ll also discuss more about cash flows and what they entail.
Table of Contents
What is Cash Flow?
Cash flows are often mistaken for business expense sheets, but these are 2 different things. A cash flow shows how money goes in and out of your business. On the other hand, a business expense spreadsheet only shows the expenses and sometimes a small summary of the income.
Positive cash flow is seen when the incoming money is more than the outgoing money, while negative cash flow indicates that more money is leaving than entering, almost like profit and loss.
There are three primary components of cash flow:
- Operating Cash Flow:Â This refers to the cash being made or used by the main operations of a business, for example, the revenue from sales and payments for expenses like wages, utilities, and inventory.
- Investing Cash Flow:Â This is the cash flow related to the buying or selling of long-term assets, such as property, equipment, or investments. It includes cash inflows from asset sales and cash outflows for asset purchases.
- Financing Cash Flow:Â This category involves cash flow related to financing activities, such as obtaining loans, issuing stock, or paying dividends. It includes cash inflows from borrowing or equity financing and cash outflows for loan repayments or dividends to shareholders.
What To Include In a Cash Flow Template Google Sheets Spreadsheet
A cash flow statement template should include the following components:
- Period:Â This shows the period detailed by the cash flow template, such as a month, quarter, or year. This helps in tracking the money flow and comparing income and expenses of different periods.
- Opening Cash Balance:Â This section shows the balance that the business begins with for that specific period. It serves as starting point for tracking cash flow and also ensuring you can track all the finances accurately.
- Cash Inflows:Â This is a record of the money coming in. This may include sales revenue, investments, or any other sources of cash entering the business during the specified period.
- Cash Outflow: This section represents the various expenses and payments your business incurs during the specified period. This may include operating expenses, payroll, rent, utilities, loan payments, inventory purchases, taxes, and any other expenditures.
- Net Cash Flow Calculation:Â This is the total cash flow for each period that is calculated by subtracting the total cash outflows from the total cash inflows. This figure shows the overall balance or deficit left for that specific period and provides a clear indication of your business’s cash flow position.
- Cash Flow Summary: This is a small section that shows the cash inflows, cash outflows, and net cash flow for each period. This is good for a quick and easy reference when analyzing trends or comparing cash flow across different periods.
- Cash Flow Forecast:Â You can also include a separate section for cash flow forecasting that shows the potential future cash inflows and outflows based on anticipated sales, expenses, and other factors.
These are the main thing that should be present in a cash flow template. You can add and adjust more things as you see fit. Now we’ll show you how to make your own cash flow statement template in Google Sheets.
How to Make a Cash Flow Spreadsheet on Google Sheets
Here’s how to make a cash flow spreadsheet in Google Sheets step by step:
- Open a blank spreadsheet
- Rename the spreadsheet by clicking on the tab for Untitled spreadsheet.
- Add the title and the company name. You can merge the cells by selecting them and clicking the merge tool in the toolbar.
- Create a section for the period and opening balance.
- Add the header for the category and the header columns for each detail.
- Add the details of the expenses or revenue.
- Add the formulas.
- Format your table.
If you have a hard time with this or simply don’t have the time, then no worry. We have some Google Sheets cash flow templates below.
Google Sheets Cash Flow Templates
Monthly Cash Flow Template Google Sheets
The Monthly cash flow template is a thoroughly detailed template that shows the cash flow for your business for an entire year.
It includes:
- The date and the employee detail
- The previous year’s opening and closing balance
- The current year’s opening and closing balance
- Cash inflow: operating, investments, and financing
- Cash outflow: Payroll, expenses, Taxes
- Totals
- Differences
This template will help you track expenses for a whole year and prepare for the coming year.
Simple Google Sheet Cash Flow Template
The simple cash flow template is a great template for a small business or a freelancer, or an independent contractor. It has a simple format that is easy to understand and not too crowded but still enough to detail all your finances.
It includes:
- The period
- The opening balance
- Operations in flow and Outflow
- Investments inflow and outflow
- Financing in-flow and outflow
You can show the outflow or expenses using a negative sign (-), and this will also reflect in the calculations. This means that you don’t have to have 2 separate tables, and you can summarize your cash flow easily.
Personal Cash Flow Template
The personal cash flow template is a very simple and straightforward template to use to manage your household budget.
It includes:
- The date
- Income streams
- Budgeted income
- Actual income
- Expenses
- Sellers/ vendors
- Expenses amounts
- Totals and balance
This is the perfect template for you if you’ve been wondering where your money is going lately. You can track down your expenses and handle the necessary and unnecessary ones.
Why Should You Use Our Templates?
There are several reasons why using our Cash flow templates would be beneficial for you:
- Our Cash flow templates are time savers when you’re rushing to prepare for that meeting or simply want to focus on other work.
- The cash flow templates are also well organized so that you can easily keep track of your business expenses effectively.
- With our templates, you have access to the cash flow spreadsheet all the time on any device since they are on Google Sheets.
- Our templates are also very versatile, and you can even download them and use them as business expense tracker Excel templates.
- Our templates are also professionally designed so that you can use them in your business meetings and during your presentations.
Why Use a Cash Flow Template to Manage Cash Flow?
Using a cash flow template is highly beneficial for effectively managing cash flow in your business. Here are several reasons why:
- A cash flow template allows you to track the timing and amount of cash coming into your business from sales, investments, loans, and other sources, as well as the cash going out for expenses, loan payments, inventory purchases, and other financial obligations. This visibility enables you to understand your cash position and make informed decisions to maintain healthy cash flow.
- With a cash flow template, you can project your future cash inflows and outflows based on historical data, sales forecasts, and other relevant factors. With this, you can anticipate periods of cash surplus or shortfall and plan accordingly.
- A cash flow template helps you identify potential cash flow issues before they become critical. This early warning system allows you to take proactive measures before things go wrong. It also serves as a lesson from previous failures that you can use to ensure you don’t repeat the same mistakes.
- A cash flow template provides valuable insights for decision-making. It helps you evaluate the financial impact of various choices, such as investing in new equipment, expanding operations, or offering discounts to customers.
- A well-prepared cash flow template serves as a powerful tool for showing the stakeholders, like lenders, investors, and business partners, the results of your business. It shows how the business manages the money it receives from the investors and how the business is making money. In a way, it also helps to hold you accountable to your stakeholders.
- Cash flow templates also help you make financial strategies to improve your cash management for your business. You can confirm the effectiveness of the strategies you’re using by analyzing the cash flow, and you can prepare new strategies.
Final Thoughts
Cash flows are a great indicator of whether your business is succeeding or not. You can create and easily track your cash flow spreadsheet on Google Sheets, but you may not have to since, in this article, we’ve given you access to some cash flow template Google Sheets files that are ready to be filled.
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