📊 5 Cashflows templates every CFO needs

Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. But cash is reality.

And after working with over 100 fast-growing companies in my career, I've seen firsthand what happens when a company doesn't track their cash flows properly.

I've seen this story happen many times.

A company is not tracking their cash flows. And they don't realize that all of a sudden they can't make payroll.

What actually kills a company?

It's not a lack of sales. It's not high expenses. It's running out of cash.

So today I'm going to fix that.

Five must-have cashflows templates for any business.

And by the end, you'll know exactly which one to reach for, and when.

This is the foundation.

All you need to produce it is an income statement and a balance sheet.

It breaks into three sections: operating activities, investing activities, and financing activities.

You start with net income, add back depreciation and amortization, then account for the changes in your current assets and liabilities.

When it's connected to a three-statement model, every change you make flows through automatically.

But while this template is helpful, it's also a lot of information.

Most people don't really know how to read this, let alone the fact that they may not want all this detail.

And it's also pretty boring and ugly.

Which brings us to template two.

Same data. Much easier to consume.

This groups everything into clean summary buckets.

What I like about this is it becomes really easy to showcase the information on a quarterly basis, an annual basis, or even a custom basis using year to date or trailing 12 months.

And if you want to present this to a stakeholder, you just hide the columns you don't need.

Now you have an easy snapshot you can share with anyone.

Now we're making it visual.

This takes everything from the summarized statement and turns it into charts and clean visuals.

Change the year and all the information will automatically update.

It's just pulling everything directly from your drivers. No additional heavy lifting.

The biggest thing I'm after is insights.

And there's one insight where if you're not on top of it, you could literally destroy your entire business.

This one is my favorite. And the most important one in the whole list.

You want to understand at all times: when are you projected to run out of cash?

This dashboard answers that question directly.

Here's a real example. You can see the company is projected to run out of cash in May 2026. I change the capital injection from $1 million to $1.5 million.

I go back to the dashboard.

Now we've bought until July. Two months.

That's the difference between making payroll and not.

And this is why it's so important to have these templates connected to a three-statement model.

As you make changes, as you roll forward each and every single month, the dashboards update automatically without any additional heavy lifting.

When you need to zoom all the way in, this is the template you reach for.

Most models track cash monthly.

But it's really common to track cash flows on a weekly basis.

There's a special term for this: 13 week cash flows.

This runs on the direct method, which is a lot more intuitive to read.

You can see exactly how much you're projecting to collect in cash from customers.

How much you're expected to pay for payroll. How much you're drawing down for debt. How much you're repaying.

You can't get this level of granularity using the indirect method.

There are two scenarios where this template is essential.

The first is if the company is in a serious cash crunch. You're going to want to measure every single expenditure to make sure they don't run out of cash.

The second is if the company gets so big that they have their own treasury function, focused on optimizing cash, taking advantage of the right interest rates, and managing debt instruments.

To me, being a strong CFO means that you understand when to use each and every single one of these templates and how to explain what's actually happening in the business.

That's the job.

Now, setting all of this up from scratch, especially for a new client with a custom chart of accounts, is pretty tedious and manual.

That's exactly why I built ​Model Wiz​.

It's an Excel add-in that connects directly to your QuickBooks Online or Xero account and builds all of this with just one click.

Which of these five are you missing right now?

Hit reply and let me know.

Josh (Your CFO Guy)

Thanks for reading my article. My goal is to help you grow in your career with proper Finance and Accounting.

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