Cash flow

The actual movement of money in and out of the business over time. Profit is an opinion about a period; cash is a fact about today, and businesses die of cash, not of accounting.

A business can be profitable on paper and unable to pay Friday's wages: money arrives late, sits in stock, or leaves in lumps (tax, rent quarters, equipment). Cash flow is the discipline of watching the actual account against the actual calendar.

The owner's practical metric is cash cover: money available divided by a normal week's outgoings, which answers "how many weeks would we survive if takings stopped?" A cover target turns vague anxiety into a number with a threshold, and belongs on the weekly dashboard.

Cash is also where books meet reality: deposits that do not match recorded sales are the first thing a lender, a buyer, or an honest weekly review will catch.