Great question! The answer is a resounding no! Also, just because you're profitable doesn't mean you have a positive cash flow!
Profit is what's called Net Income (for argument's sake, let's do EBIT--Earnings Before Income Taxes). Cash flow is simply your delta in cash from one period to the next.
Lots of things go into net income, but essentially it's revenue minus costs. Because of GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Practices--only in the US), you recognize revenue when it is earned not when it is collected. So, let's say you buy a car and you pay $5,000 down on a $30,000 car. The car company records revenue of $30,000. In their balance sheet, they also add $5,000 to cash, and $25,000 to what's called Accounts Receivable. Their cash flow is now $5,000.
Let's further say that they owe payroll, to the tune of $10,000 for that month. And you were the only poor bastard that bought a car from them that month. They have to pay $10,000 in cash for payroll, and that also gets logged as an expense. So, their profit shows a $20,000 net profit, but they have -$5,000 in cash flow.
You can extend the example to make it positive for a company that's not profitable, if you'd like.
Being operationally cash flow positive means that on a day to day basis your bank balance is increasing. Being profitable means that all of the money comes in in greater than your total costs.
So for example, if you look at HP's write down, they were operationally cash flow positive for the quarter but are 'writing off' 8+ billion dollars. So they "lost" over $8B this quarter. Aka not profitable during the quarter.
So the milestones you look for as a company are that you are cash flow positive for the day (all of todays costs covered by revenue), cash flow positive for the quarter (net increase in cash on and over the quarter) and cash flow positive for the year (net cash increase for the year), and finally profitable (total income exceeded all costs, both tangible and intangible (like depreciation)).
So to put it simply, cash flow is like a differential of profit? So you can have a profit of -1M$, but as long as the next month you get more (like -0.8M$), you're cash flow positive (+0.2M$), right?
I'm having trouble parsing the examples given in this thread; the above sounds like what I more-less understood from them.
Nope, no differential. It's more like profit = cash flow (i.e. profit on day-to-day things) + profit/loss on investments/loans (e.g. taking out a loan, paying off a loan, but also cases where you own the same thing as before, but value it higher or lower now for some reason).
So e.g. during the housing bubble, some companies were cash flow negative (i.e. losing money on their day-to-day business), but they recorded a profit for the quarter because the buildings they owned were worth more at the end of it than they had been at the start.
Let's say one month the only business you do is when I write you an IOU for $40k and your expenses are $30k. You have made $10k in profit (since the IOU is worth $40k), but you are cash-flow negative, since you have $30k less cash in the bank.
No, not at all. To put it simply, profit is cash flow over a long period.
A business might have customers on a monthly plan, paying $2000 over their entire lifetime. If it costs $1000 in sales and set-up expenses to get a customer, they are profitable. But the expenses have to be paid up front, whereas the income will trickle in over a long period.
This means that even profitable companies might need to take loans or raise financing if they need to pay for expenses now, but the income from those sales arrives in months or years down the line. A cash-flow positive company doesn't have the risk of running out of money while waiting for the profits to come in.
No, cash flow and profit are both differentials of net value. But they are both noisy.
Ideally, profit abstracts away all the messy details of cash flow. If you buy a new robot, that's not a loss, that's an investment, so your profit shouldn't change (until the robot starts depreciating). So profit (not cashflow) is a better metric. On the other hand, you don't know that the robot will really be useful, so maybe cashflow is better.
