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Statement of Cash Flows

The Statement of Cash Flows shows where cash actually came from and where it went — which is not the same question as profit. A profitable month can still drain the bank, and this statement is what shows why. It reads on screen, drills down to the ledger, and prints as a PDF or exports to Excel.

Where to find it

Go to Financial Statement > Cash Flow Statement. The same figures print through Reports > General Ledger > Statement of Cash Flows.

Two views of the same money

View	Shows	Use when
Indirect method	Net profit, adjusted for non-cash items and changes in working capital, then investing and financing.	The statutory presentation, and for explaining why profit and cash differ.
Receipts and payments	The same cash movement listed as what came in and what went out.	Seeing the actual receipts and payments behind the figures.

The indirect method

Section	Contains
Net profit	The starting point, from the profit and loss.
Adjustments for non-cash items	Depreciation and anything else that reduced profit without moving cash.
Changes in working capital	Movements in debtors, creditors and stock.
Net cash from operating activities	The subtotal — what the trading itself produced.
Cash flows from investing activities	Buying and selling assets.
Cash flows from financing activities	Loans, capital and drawings.
Net increase / (decrease)	The three sections added up.
Opening and closing cash	Cash and cash equivalents at each end of the period.

Every non-cash balance sheet movement lands in the section of its account group, so the sections always add up to the actual change in your bank and cash accounts. A statement that does not reconcile is a statement that cannot be relied on, and this one is built so that it does.

Receipts and payments

The receipts view classifies each cash posting by the document type, the party and the section of the account on the other side of the entry. The result is the same net movement, arrived at from the transactions rather than from the profit figure — which makes it the view to use when a section looks wrong and you want to see what is in it.

Filters and comparison

Control	What it does
Period	The dates covered.
Compare with the previous period	Shows the prior period beside it.
Branch / Department	Narrows the statement to one.

Drilling down

Account groups open into their accounts, and every account opens its ledger. You can therefore get from an unexpected figure in a section to the individual postings behind it without leaving the statement.

The check

The statement carries a Check panel listing documents in the period whose postings do not balance, with how much they are out by. A document that does not balance breaks every statement that reads it, so it is surfaced here rather than quietly distorting a section.

Where the sections come from

Each GL account group carries a Cash Flow Section — see GL Account Groups. It is the setting that decides where a group's movement appears:

Section	Means
Automatic	Follow the parent group, or fall back to name rules.
Operating: working capital	Debtors, creditors, stock.
Operating: non-cash adjustment	Depreciation and similar.
Investing	Fixed assets and investments.
Financing	Loans, capital, drawings.
Cash and cash equivalents	The accounts the statement reconciles to.

Automatic is right for most groups and worth checking for the rest. A section that looks wrong on the statement is almost always a group sitting in the wrong one — fix it on the account group and every period corrects itself, including past ones.

Output

Print / PDF and Export Excel are on the screen, and the report version is under General Ledger reports for scheduling and for the usual report parameters.

GL Account Groups — where the cash flow section is set
Profit and Loss — the profit the indirect method starts from
Balance Sheet — the movements working capital is drawn from
Financial Overview — the headline position

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