In accounting, a cash flow statement is a type of financial statement that reports the cash receipts and payments for a specific period of time.
Essentially reports how you spent and how you collected cash.
Note: cash isn’t a requirement to record sales (especially in income statements) — for those documents, it’s a question of whether or not you’ll get the cash, not if you’ve already received it. But for cash flow statements there are no guesses: it’s either you got the cash or you didn’t.
Elements
Elements in the cash flow statement are categorised in one of the three business activities: operating, investing, and financing. Its purpose is to reconcile the change in cash to the beginning and ending cash statements, and should agree with the amount on the balance sheet.
We sum the inflows and outflows of the business activities to get the final net increase in cash.