What is a Cash Flow Table

What Problems Are We Trying To Solve?

Two of the major concerns in personal money management are outlined below.

• Are you spending your money wisely?  It's easy to let money slip through your fingers, a subscription you no longer use, over indulging at the bar, the following the latest fashions. Even small amounts add up. If you can save $50 a week and put it into an account paying 5% interest you will have $2,664.70 at the end of the year. If you can do it for 3 years you will have $8,410.78.  
• Will your finances enable you to do the things you want to do? Life is meant to be lived, not endured. Careful planning will show you what is achievable and what is not. Are there are any changes you can make to your life style to enable you to do the things you want to? Everyone has ideas of what they want to do, but do you know what effect they will have on your future finances? 

This website provides an Interactive Cash Flow Table which is an incredibly useful tool that helps you to quickly determine if you are spending your money wisely and if your finances will enable you to do the things you want to.

It can clearly state your current and future finances, so you can make choices and have a reasonably predictable outcome.  

Are You Spending Your Money Wisely?

The easiest way to see how you are spending your money and earning your income is to generate a cash flow table from your transactions. A cash flow table is a summary of your monthly income and expenditure by category, making it easier to see where your money goes. Looking at individual transactions can be overwhelming, but a cash flow table highlights the key information, helping you focus on what really matters.

Once you have your transactions (every income and expense is a transaction) in a cash flow table it is easy to examine the table and determine if you're spending your money wisely.

Basic Cash Flow Table

Each number in the cash flow table represents a total of the transactions for that month/category/subcategory combination. As all transactions must be accounted for, the totals at the bottom always remain consistent regardless of how you choose to categorize your transactions.

By organizing transactions into categories that aligns with your financial perspective, the cash flow table becomes a valuable tool. It might take a few attempts to perfect your categories, but the process is straightforward.

Below is an example of a cash flow table where the transactions have been grouped into three categories, income, subscriptions, and utility bills.

Categories and Subcategories

It's helpful to break down each main category into subcategories for more detailed insight. Since you'll be choosing the categories and subcategories, here's a useful tip: make each subcategory something you could potentially change or adjust. For example, switching electricity providers, changing your commute, or cutting back on certain expenses are all good subcategory candidates. This approach makes your cash flow table more actionable and useful for decision-making.

What Should I look for?

• Look at the totals on the bottom, earning more than you spend or spending more than you earn? Need to change anything?
• The amounts should be aligned to your expectation?
• Unexpected expenditure for example $22 Zwift in April, $93 Energy in May
• Does any expenditure look unreasonable? eg Phone and Internet seems quite high.

Can You Build a Cash Flow Table in a Spreadsheet?

You can. A cash flow spreadsheet in Excel or Google Sheets is where most people start: months across the top, categories down the side, a formula summing each cell. For a month or two it works fine.

The upkeep is where a cash flow spreadsheet gets heavy. Every transaction is typed or pasted in by hand, then categorized by hand. A stray row breaks a SUM. Reconciling the sheet against your actual bank balance is a monthly chore, and the moment you want to overlay a forecast, split a category, or see two years at once, you are rebuilding formulas instead of looking at your money.

The catch: a spreadsheet does not know what a transaction is. It cannot pull your history in, suggest categories, keep the totals reconciled, or drop a forecast on top of the real numbers. That is the difference between a cash flow spreadsheet and the interactive cash flow table on this site: the same layout, none of the maintenance.

Will Your Finances Enable You to do the Things You Want to Do?

Financial planning is a crucial part of achieving both short-term stability and long-term success. At its core, it’s about understanding where your money is coming from, where it's going, and how you can manage it to meet your goals. Whether that’s buying a home, starting a business, saving for retirement, or simply reducing financial stress.

A solid financial plan gives you control over your finances instead of letting your finances control you. It helps you track income, spending, savings, and investments, ensuring you live within your means while preparing for the future. Planning allows you to set clear financial goals and map out realistic steps to reach them.

Financial planning promotes better decision-making. With a clear overview of your financial situation, you can make informed choices about spending, borrowing, and investing. This reduces impulsive or emotional decisions and increases your chances of long-term financial security. Financial planning isn’t just for the wealthy, it's a smart strategy for anyone who wants to build confidence, reduce stress, and create a better future.

The core aspect of financial planning involves knowing what your in for. How far can you cut your expenses if you really had to? If you splashed out on a new car then what would the new repayments mean to your ability to give the boss the finger? What would happen to your finances if something major happened in your life,  you got married, moved house, ditched the job and went traveling? How long could you sustain it for? Knowing you will be OK will reduce stress, knowing you will not be ok will allow you to do something about it.

Cash flow forecasts are a way of predicting the changes in your cash flow if certain events transpired. A cash flow forecast is simply a way of predicting future cash flows (income and expenses). Our website makes putting these together incredibly simple and then allows you to augment your cash flow tables with your cash flow forecasts so you can see how your finances would be affected.

Cash Flow Forecast

Using our website you can create as many cash flow forecasts as you want to . Simply enter in the details of what you think will be your income or expenditure for those categories. You can set a forecast at the Category or subcategory level. These cash flow forecasts can then be shown with your cash flow table, allowing you to see the predicted behavior of the cash flow forecast.

When a cash flow forecast is added to your cash flow table, the months for which you do not have transactions will use the amounts from the cash flow forecast. These forecasted amounts will be in italics so you can tell them apart.

The totals in the total column (on the right hand side) will show the actual cash flows plus the forecasted cash flows. The total row (on the bottom) will show either the actual cash flow total or the forecasted cash flow total.

Cash Flow Forecast as a Budgeting Tool

Using our interactive cash flow table, when you add a cash flow forecast to a cash flow table that has both forecast data and actual data then the cells will become color coded for you to see how you are tracking to plan. The red boxes are where the forecast is set but expenses are higher than forecast, the green boxes are where the expenses are equal to or lower than forecast.

The table above also shows how you can set a forecast at either the category or subcategory level.

You can use this feature to track to a budget and check the accuracy of your forecast.  Ideally it would be green so that you are keeping within budget. 

In the example above this table the cash flow forecast is being used to track current spending. But it can also be used to track income.

Be the Person with a Plan

The point of a cash flow forecast is to understand what will happen to your cash flow for a particular scenario. As you will undoubtably have several options for "what will the future look like if this happened.....", you can have as multiple cash flow forecasts. That way you can consider how viable each of the options you have is.  

The cash flow table below shows a forecast for renting out a house and going traveling. The numbers on the bottom show how much each month is going to cost. The cash flow table does not point out if you can afford the trip or not, it points out how much money will be gained or lost over the year, so you can plan for it.

Points to Note..

• The monthly totals show that the rent and mortgage payment cycles are not lined up. This does not mean there is less money coming in but that you will need to plan accordingly.  
• The amounts are reasonably high, so it's a fairly lavish trip. Maybe go somewhere cheaper?
• There is no line item for unexpected costs. When does anything ever go perfectly?