Excel: Building a 13-Week Cash Flow

In this practical course, learn how to create a robust and dynamic cash flow forecast using Microsoft Excel. Instructor Christopher Reilly shows you how to clean up your source data, build a cash flow forecast from scratch, summarize your findings, and refresh the forecast with new data. You'll also discover how to perform variance analysis to compare actual results against your projections. By the end of this course, you'll have a powerful tool to help you manage your business's cash flow and make informed financial decisions.

Learning objectives
Apply data cleaning techniques to import, organize, and format bank data, including inserting helper columns, adding week-ending dates, and building transaction mapping and error-checking formulas.
Construct a comprehensive cash flow forecast by calculating historical data, integrating accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) aging reports, and linking relevant data sources to create an accurate and dynamic forecast.
Build your cash flow summaries by establishing summary dates, finalizing the print layout, populating the summary with relevant data, updating error-checking mechanisms, and building a cash flow chart to visually assess the company's financial performance and identify potential risks or opportunities.
Demonstrate the ability to refresh and update the cash flow forecast by duplicating the forecast, importing new bank data, bringing in AR and AP reports, and refreshing data in the cash flow forecast and summary.
Analyze variances between actual and forecasted cash flow by adding variance tags, creating a variance report layout, populating the variance bridge, and calculating category variances to identify areas of discrepancy and potential improvement.