Reporting Cash Flow

In this article we show powerful and quick ways of retrieving a very important part of the project budget - cash flow information.

What is cash flow? Think of it as the cost schedule - a prediction of when we are to spend what quantities of money. Cost schedules emanate from resource schedules. That is, if we know when we are due to require the services of our resources, and we know what they cost us, we ought to be able to recover the aggregate of such costs within certain intervals such as a week, fortnight, month or quarter.

Resource schedules of course derive from task schedules which are predictions of what work is due to happen and when. For if we know this, along with who and what materials are required for such work, the resource schedule pops out.

When we have the three schedules, we have the outputs of the plan. We can show all this in the form of a table.

Output Inputs
Task Schedule Tasks, durations and predecessors
Resource Schedule Task Schedule and Resource Allocations
Cost Schedule Resource Schedule and Cost Rate

Someone, somewhere in your organization will need to know something about not only how much cost your project will incur, but when the money will be spent. A cash flow report is all they require.

Cash flow Hard Copy Reports
In Microsoft Project it is possible to view cash flow information from the 'Reports'. This is only for hardcopy purposes and can be reached by means of

The total for the project will be shown on the bottom line of the output.

Cash flow Screen Views
To see this on the screen, we need to do a little more work. It will first be necessary to have either an overarching task at the top of the list on a Gantt Chart View for example, under which all other tasks and milestones are indented. This is because we do not have a bottom line total. Instead, on the screen, the totals can be made to roll up against this overarching task.

To achieve this, simply insert a new task at the top of your task list, name it appropriately (perhaps the name of the project), select all the other rows in the list and indent them.

An alternative method is to use the Project Summary row. This is achieved by using:

We are now ready to examine the cost schedule. Move to the Task Usage screen. That is, use

You will now see costs for each task, summary task and the also the entire project by virtue of our addition of an overarching task or project summary task. This will be shown for each period, depending upon the scale you currently have

Here comes the really simple part. To modify the scale, simply click the 'Zoom out' button on the toolbar, the one with a minus sign in the magnifying glass. Repeat until you see the scale of your choice. For example if you want a quarterly cash flow report, simply zoom out until you see only quarters in the timescale at the top of the screen.

The scaling can also be achieved by means of

In the last option on this screen, select your desired time scale.