Cashflow & scurve

S Curves are cummulative curve of cost or resource usage/assigment. Cummulative values are the summ of the period and all prior periods values, it increases on each period, can be of cost or resource usage, can also be of cash flow, in this case will yield Cummulative Cash Flow.

There is a lag beteween actual payments and actual receipts, these you shall consider in your cash flow, the following is a very simple table for your exploration, it shall give you the idea.

Rafael

Hi Rafael

Could you please clarify!!!

Is it correct to assume

"Cash Flow means the actual payments received till the period end with (resource usage profile based on cost + Profit) for the forecasted period" ???

How do we accomodate the lag between actual payments & actual receipts in the forecast period?

Best regards

Shareef A Azeez

Shareef,

Sorry I did not answered before but the new site interface makes it harder for me to see what is going on.

Cash flow means Actual Payments Received (Billings Received) minus Expenses Paid or C – D. Means money in your hands, related to profit but not 100%, you might be earning good profit in your job but if you do not receive payments on time you will get into cash flow problems.

All software works differently and you must look for the method that best fit your software and your needs. But keep in perspective, Cash Flow is always an approximation of the timing, there is no way to predict it with absolute precision ahead of time.

I use a hammock activity that summaries a group of activities as looking for individual activities as in the long run is not going to give me more meaningful precisio.  With my software hammocks can have lag but most other software do not allow for this. Other software do allow for resource lag and this can be your best way to model the lag beteween the individual activities and your summary activity, in this case cost load your hammock with a resource lag.

You will need a separate hammock for every group of cash flow componentes with a different lag value. For example 5 days lag for payroll payments, 0 for cash purchases, 30 days for purchases on 30days credit and whatever applies for payments received from owner. Usually espenses are considered of negative numerical value and income of positive value.

You can mimic cash recepts to happen certain specific date, but in my opinion that is also too much granularity.

As you know activities might happen during early dates but also during late dates, therefore for cash flow you will also get early and late dates prediction. Perhaps an intermediate value makes more sense. For this intermediate values you can use the average of the two curves. Don’t waste time at the activity level, it just will not give you more meaningful precision, make your estimate under the knowledge it is an approximation.  It is well known by schedulers and everyone in the construction business that quantity take off and cost estimates usually are not far from actual but the time element has more variation.

Best regards,

Rafael

Thanks   for the information, Rafael !!!!

:)

Best Regards

Shareef A Azeez

 Dear all

thanx all

in additional fpr last answer

the difference between s-curve and cash flow

Cash flow the planned expensse arranged in tables but S curve is Graphic to this Expensess

thanks all

Hesham b

hi,

dear rafeel, thanx a lot 4 giving me the most easiest defination of the cash flow thats what i was looking for to explain my boss who wants 100% BOQ to be shown in program and no error in the monthly invioces as well.

Tanweer

tanveeraniazi@yahoo.com

Tanveer,

If you can make your BOQ Data Date(s) equal to Financial Period(s) you can model Actual Period and Past Periods BOQ with "precision" (precision at the start and finish of the financial periods) as it is past history, what you will never be able to do is predict future periods BOQ. Even when can be done I believe it not worth the effort, nevertheless just to please the whim of others or a contractual requirement at times we have to deal with it.

Look on how your software works with financial periods, we at Spider Project do not need to use financial periods to get precise BOQ values for actual ( at the start, in between and at the end), of course future BOQ values are still uncertain.

Ironically it is on the estimation of the uncertain, the inexact values, the future values where I consider the cost loading of most value. You can get close enough prediction of future values for financial decisions without the need to make your values 100% equal to BOQ, at least will not make a relevant difference.

Best Regards,

Rafael

Dear All,

can any one share sample files of cashflow and s curve? either it is in primavera or excel?

Regards,

Tahir Hameed

one and the same