Understanding the Cash Flow Table

Introduction to the Cash Flow Table

There are two ways that your cash flow and other related data can be displayed: graph view and tabular view.

In the tabular view, your business's cash flow is displayed in a detailed table format: both, the business's actual as well as its forecasted cash flow transactions are depicted within an exhaustive table. You can see the company's historical cash balance twelve months in the past, and based on that, Forwardly is also able to accurately predict the cash flow for the next twelve months.

Understanding the Basic Features

There are multiple ways that you can slice and dice the cash flow report based on different types of criteria.

Time Period

As the term implies, you can both narrow down and spread the report across specific, predefined time periods. The available options are listed below.

• The Daily option shows the actual and forecasted data for every single day along with the opening and closing balance. With the current date in focus, you can scroll to the previous as well as the next days.
• The Weekly option shows the actual and forecasted data with the current week in focus and the option to scroll to the previous or next week. The default week format will be from Monday to Sunday.
• The Monthly option shows twelve months of data at a time; six months in the past, and six months in the future by default. It includes the actuals of the previous twelve months from the current date and the next twelve months' calculations based on the downloaded data from the accounting software.

Date Range

This option allows you to select a date range, starting in the past ("History" or historical data) and into the future ("Forecast" or system-predicted data).

Whether this range is defined in terms of days, weeks, or months is predicated on the Period option; there is a correspondence between the two. Select the past and forecasted days/weeks/months from the drop-down right above the table, and it will show data for those selected days/weeks/months on the cash flow graph.

Scroll

You can scroll to previous and subsequent days' data by clicking the arrows toward the top corners of the table.

Go to Date

You can view calendar information by day, month, and year. To change between different views, click the Calendar icon buttons in the top-left corner of your table. Select the date, month, or year to see the data.

Transactions

You can select specific transaction types to be displayed in the views. There are two types of transactions available for both the table and the graph: actual and system. Actual transactions are pulled directly from your accounting software, whereas system transactions are based on Forwardly's forecasts. 

Expand & Collapse the Transactional Data

By default, the transactional data is displayed in the collapsed view. It will list only the COA heads along with their corresponding totals, with no details of their transactions.

You will be able to drill down into greater transaction details by clicking the arrow next to the customer or vendor segregated based on their respective COA groups.

A Deep Dive into Transactional Data

The left side of the table categorizes the company's transactional data, specifically the following details.

• The Opening Balance is the amount in your bank account at the start of the accounting period. This can assume both positive and negative values.
• Cash In, which further expands to Invoice, Income, and Other, and can be further drilled down to the Chart of Accounts and Customers.
• Cash Out, which further expands to Bills, Expenses, and Other, and can be further drilled down to the Chart of Accounts and Vendors.
• The Closing Balance is the amount remaining in your bank account at the end of the accounting period. This can assume both positive and negative values.

The multi-level view

The data is displayed in a collapsed view by default for every head with the COA group. You can drill down to get the details of a transaction.

Not Specified Transactions

You will see some transactions as Not Specified in forecasts. A transaction could be labelled as Not Specified for either of the following two reasons:

• The transaction in question has been entered without a contact name in the connected accounting software.
• There are multiple such irregular transactions under a particular chart of account in the linked accounting software.

A practical example of this would be a car dealership: there are rarely repeat customers, and company sales will typically list different customers. In this case, since there's no one specific customer, and all such transactions fall under the same COA, they will appear as Not Specified in the Forwardly forecast.