Technical Overview

Customization is facilitated through the introduction of two new doctypes: Cash Flow Mapper and Cash Flow Mapping. Both doctypes encompass the necessary information essential for generating a cash flow report.

Cash Flow Mapping illustrates how accounts in your charts of accounts align with line items in your cash flow report, while Cash Flow Mapper gathers all the Cash Flow Mappings pertinent to the three sections of a cash flow statement.

With these tools, you can generate detailed cash flow reports tailored to your specific requirements. While this might not immediately resonate, it will become clearer once we delve into an example.

Example

Background information

Let’s assume we have a fictitious company for which we want to generate a cash flow report. This is what the cash flow report looks like at the moment:

We don’t like the report for the following reasons: – The reporting format is too scant. – The ‘Net Cash From Operations’ figure is wrong.

Customization Process

Activate Customized Cash Flow Report

Do this in Accounts Settings by checking the ‘Use Custom Cash Flow Format’ checkbox. This will cause BizCentric to only use your custom format for cash flow reports.

Move to the next section to build the report.

Create Cash Flow Mappings

For each line item, it’s essential to generate a Cash Flow Mapping document to depict it.

Conceptually, the Cash Flow Mapping serves as a representation of each line in the cash flow report. A Cash Flow Mapping is nested under a Cash Flow Mapper, which we’ll discuss in more detail later.

Let’s initiate the process by crafting Cash Flow Mappings to illustrate the adjustment of non-cash expenses already accounted for in the Profit or Loss statement. These adjustments should appear on the cash statement as follows: – Income taxes recognized in profit or loss – Finance costs recognized in profit or loss – Depreciation of non-current assets.

Begin by opening a new Cash Flow Mapping form.

The fields within the Cash Flow Mapping doctype are as follows: – Name: This serves as an identifier for the document. Name it in a manner relevant to the label – Label: This designation will be visible in the cash flow statement – Accounts: This section lists all the accounts associated with this line item.

Armed with this information, let’s proceed to create the Cash Flow Mapping Document for the line item ‘Income taxes recognized in profit or loss’.

I’ve labeled it ‘Income Tax Charge’ and designated its label as ‘Income taxes recognized in profit or loss’. Our objective is to reflect income tax charges from our profit or loss statement. The account where this occurs in our chart of accounts is named ‘Income Taxes’ (an expense), so I’ve included ‘Income Taxes’ in the accounts table. If there are additional accounts representing income tax expenses, they should also be added here.

To ensure proper calculation of adjustments in the cash flow statement, select the ‘Is Income Tax Expense’ checkbox. This enables BizCentric to accurately compute the adjustments needed.

For optimal results, ensure that parent accounts have child accounts with consistent treatment for cash flow reporting purposes. BizCentric will calculate the net change of all child accounts when the selected account is a parent account.

Similarly, I’ve created mappings for the remaining two items.

Since Finance Costs also necessitate adjustment, it’s important to mark the ‘Is Finance Cost’ checkbox.

Next, let’s add Cash Flow Mappings for items indicating changes in working capital:

• Increase/(decrease) in other liabilities.
• (Increase)/decrease in trade and other receivables
• Increase/(decrease) in trade and other payables.
• VAT payable
• (Increase)/decrease in inventory

Ensure to indicate to BizCentric that these mappings represent changes in working capital by checking the ‘Is Working Capital’ checkbox.

At this stage, we’ve generated all the mappings required for the Operating Activities section of our cash flow statement. However, BizCentric isn’t aware of this yet until we create Cash Flow Mapper documents. We’ll proceed to create Cash Flow Mapper documents next.

Create Cash Flow Mappers

Cash Flow Mappers represents the sections of the cash flow statement. A standard cash flow statement has only three sections so when you view the Cash Flow Mapper list, you will that three have been created for you named: – Operating Activities – Financing Activities – Investing Activities

You will not be able to add or remove any of them, but they are editable and can be renamed.

Open the Operating Activities Cash Flow Mapper so we can add the Cash Flow Mappings we have created.

• Section Name: This is the heading of the section.
• Section Leader: This is the first sub-header immediately after the profit figure. Relates only to Operating Activities Cash Flow Mapper
• Section Subtotal: This is the label for subtotal in the cash flow statement section. Relates only to Operating Activities Cash Flow Mapper
• Section Footer: This is the label for the total in the cash flow statement section.
• Mapping: This table contains all the Cash Flow Mappings related to the Cash Flow Mapper.

Now add all the Cash Flow Mappings you have created and save.

Refresh the cash flow statement and view the changes.

Looks close to our requirements but we are not done yet. Create new mappings for ‘Investing Activities’ and ‘Financing Activities’ sections of the cash flow statement.