Cash Flow From Financing Activities (CFF): Formula and Calculations

What Is Cash Flow From Financing Activities (CFF)?

Cash flow from financing activities (CFF) helps investors and analysts understand how a company funds its operations and growth. It breaks down a company’s financing, how it raises money, and how it pays it back. The CFF highlights actions like stock issuances, borrowing money, repurchasing shares, and repaying debt.

CFF is one of three core sections of a company’s cash flow statement. The other two parts are cash flow from investing activities and cash flow from operating activities.

Formula and Calculation of Cash Flow From Financing Activities (CFF)

To understand a company’s cash flow from financing activities, subtract the outflows from the inflows. To calculate, you can use the following formula:

CFF = Cash Inflows From Financing – Cash Outflows From Financing

Where:

• Cash inflows include money from stock issuances and debt
• Cash outflows include money used to repay debt, repurchase shares, or distribute dividends

A positive CFF means a company is raising more money than it is paying out, which might indicate growth and expansion. A negative CFF means a company is paying down debt or returning capital to investors.

How CFF Works

CFF follows the movement of cash from a company to its investors and creditors, detailing a company’s financial structure. It’s different from cash from operating activities, which is cash from a company’s core business operations, and cash from investing activities, which is cash from the purchase and sale of assets.

Cash flow from financing activities deals with the following actions:

• New stock issuance (cash inflow)
• Debt, such as loans or bond issuances (cash inflow)
• Share repurchases (cash outflow)
• Debt repayments (cash outflow)
• Dividends to shareholders (cash outflow)

It’s important to note that neither a positive nor negative CFF is good or bad. The outcome depends on the company’s strategy and financial situation. A consistently positive and high CFF could indicate that a company is relying too much on external financing than its earnings, which may lead to high debt burdens later on, which could be difficult to repay.

A negative CFF could indicate a healthy debt repayment process or on the other hand, consistent cash outflows could represent strained liquidity. It’s important to understand a company’s entire financial structure and business situation to determine if its cash flow from financing activities is healthy or one that could signal financial distress.

Benefits and Limitations of Using CFF

CFF can provide investors and analysts with insight into a company’s financing activities, but it also comes with many limitations.

Benefits

CFF details how a company is funding its operations, whether through debt or equity. This shows how much a company relies on external financing and how it pays down its debt.

It also provides information on a company’s liquidity. As noted, a positive CFF might indicate a company is raising capital to grow and expand while a negative CFF might indicate a company is aiming to reduce its debt levels or buyback shares, returning value to investors.

CFF can also provide analysts with insight into management’s financial strategy and any shifting trends. For example, raising capital might indicate management is changing its capital structure and increasing its risk tolerance.

Limitations

CFF doesn’t provide the entire picture. While an investor can see that a company is raising capital or paying down debt, CFF doesn’t provide insight into why, whether the actions are positive or negative, and what the long-term effect could be.

CFF provides a short-term focus because it captures immediate financing but is not much of an indication of a company’s long-term financing strategy. As noted, a company may raise capital in the short term but have difficulty paying that off in the long term.

Lastly, there is a potential for investors to be misled if they don’t understand the reasons behind the financing activities. For example, while a negative CFF could appear to be a cause for concern, strategic debt reductions or share buybacks can benefit a company.

While raising capital through stock issuance may appear positive, it might now show if a company is finding it difficult to raise capital through other means.

Example of CFF

To illustrate CFF, we can take a look at the fictional company, Photo Tech. Here are its financing activities for the year.