How To Run a Statement of Cash Flows in QuickBooks Online

hi this is tim yoder with fit small business today i'm going to teach you how to create a statement of cash flows with quickbooks online this tutorial is one of our 46 free quickbooks online tutorials that you can find by googling fit small business quickbooks online tutorials so let's get started from our quickbooks dashboard so to create any report we want to go to our left menu bar and click on reports we're looking for the statement of cash flow which we can see i've already marked as a favorite but let's scroll down and see where it's normally located which is in the business overview section and down here we have statement of cash flows so this created a statement of cash flows for paul's plumbing we can scroll up to see our basic options this paul's plumbing is a sample company that has most of the transactions dated in 2024 so i'm going to change the dates here to reflect 2024. anytime you change these options you have to click run report and there we go we have paul's plumbing statement of cash flows for 2024. so the statement of cash flows is an important financial statement but it's also by far the hardest to understand kind of explaining in depth the statement of cash flows is beyond this tutorial beyond the purpose of this tutorial so let me just at least explain the three sections we have operating activities which in paul's plumbing case did very good at actually operating activities provided two hundred and sixteen thousand dollars worth of cash flow if this operating activities is negative that means you lost cash on your operations which is not something that can be sustained forever so be wary if this number is negative investing activities includes both investing in traditional investment stocks and bonds or could it be investing in equipment which is the case in paul's plumbing an investment of twenty five hundred dollars in computer equipment and the third section is your financing activities uh so this is money invested by owners invested by bondholders and money you pay out to owner so here we can see that we paid 135 000 to the owner so those are your three basic sections and then at the bottom of the balance sheet it reconciles your beginning cash to your ending cash so we had 77 000 at the beginning of the year we had 80 000 of positive cash flow during the year to revive at the cash at the end of the year of 157 000 so as president as impressive as 80 000 is the cash flow statement actually looks even more impressive because we generated 216 000 of cash flow from our operating activities and paid out 134 000 to our owner okay so that's just a very brief overview if you really want to understand the cash flow statement some more you'll need to do some studying like i said it's useful the most useful thing is just to print it look at this operating activities make sure you're generating a positive cash flow from your operations okay so other options we can use in our cash flow report we can display columns right now we just have one column for totals only we can actually display it by any number of things probably one of the most common is quarters click run report and again this is going to break our cash flow in to four quarters and we can see we actually made positive cash flow in every quarter cash flow from operations okay excellent so fewer basic options than most reports but we can still change the the period and then how we want that period split up onto the cash statement of cash flows so other options we have we can click customize so we can format our numbers here we can format how we want negative numbers to appear rows and columns um again these are the these are actually also the general options we just addressed the top of the screen so we can divide columns into quarters we can filter the information so we could print cash flow just for particular customers vendors location classes and products and services location in class might be the most interesting of course to be able to separate your cash flow statement by location in class you'll have to be assigning a location in class to every transaction so in order to to learn how to set up the location and class tracking in quickbooks online i encourage you to google fit small business quickbooks online tutorials and some of our setup tutorials will actually show you how to create location and classes so that you can start tracking your activity and then finally we have the header and footer so you can customize this however you would like so play with those options remember to hit run report when you're done so that you can see your updated report once you have the report exactly like you want it you can click the envelope here to email it this will email it as a pdf or you can print it to your local printer or you can export it and if you export it you can either export it as an excel file which would allow you to continue to modify it or you can export it as a pdf which would make it easier to share with people great and the final thing if you've customized your report and you know you're going to want to see this exact template in the future you can save the customization and we're going to call it let's call this say quarterly cash flow okay and let's just save it excellent now if we go to our reports we can look in our custom reports and we have our quarterly cash flow so we can click on that brings it up just like we had formatted it we don't have to go through and reformat it so that's how you create a statement of cash flows in quickbooks online i hope this was useful and that you have a great day thank you

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