Company-Level Cash-Flow Management

Abstract

The importance of cash-flow management, and thus the need for it, is a matter of consensus among researchers and practitioners alike. They all agree about the difficulties in generating automatic cash-flow forecasts at the project level due to such problems as compatability—which is explained in this paper—or the lack of detailed data. At the company level it is even more difficult to forecast cash flow, due to the varying levels of data detail for different projects. The paper begins with a comprehensive background of cash-flow management. It then describes the development of a cash-flow management model for the organizational level, followed by the detailed computer program written on this basis. The system presented here is unique because it manages the cash flow of the company as a whole, it is flexible—accepting projects with varying degrees of detailing levels, it requires no human involvement in cash-flow generation, it is accurate, and it is a typical management tool. The uses of such a tool are also discussed.