Chapter 2 Video: CFD

In this Excel tutorial I will be showing you how to take a monthly income and expenses and make them into a cash flow diagram. Many times when you are sitting in your class you think, I don't know no business, I really don't have income coming in expenses going out the door. But in reality you do have that. It's your check in account. Think about it, you get paid and then you spend the money. So, as you can see on your screen, I’ve put in some example monthly income and expenses.

I've covered 4 weeks of the month, you have some income coming in and then you have a variety of different expenses that come out, and they come out at different times during the month. In order to make a cash flow diagram out of this information, simply highlight what you want to graph. So, what I'm doing here is I am highlighting the information I would like to graph. Go to inserts and then we want to pick a column. Now, when you click on this notice you can see a wide variety of different column types to pick from.

I'm going to select a 2D column and it's called stack. Notice if I click the different ones you can actually see an explanation that pops up about what it is. So, I'm selecting the 2D stacked column, just click it and what will happen is your information shows up in a graph. Notice this graph doesn't quite look like the way a cash flow diagram should be. So you can actually go in, right click, and say select data. Maybe I don't have them quite right, so I'm just going to try to switch rows and columns, move this out of the way. Ooh! That looks a lot better. But remember, week was not something that should be in here, so I’m simply going to remove it and hit okay. Notice, this looks like a cash flow diagram. I have money going out and money coming in and I can see by the color coding what the different things are.

If you would like to add a title to your data, you can easily do this. Just click on your title and you can format the chart area. Actually, not format the chart [Chuckles] area, but you can go in to layout and put in a chart title, so I can select centered overlay title and I could just say, Monthly income and expenses, notice that popped right up, I hit return and it shows up in my chart. If I want to have axes titled, I can do a primary horizontal or I can do a primary vertical. So these are easy to do. So in a primary horizontal, I'm just going to put weeks. Notice it slid in there and then for axes title on the vertical, I'm just going to put dollars. Now, if you don't like to say dollars like this, you can go in and actually format the axes title and I think you can get it to change the alignment to where it is switched to be rotated like this. So there's many things you can do in here to make your graph look better.

So, it is very easy in Excel to take monthly income and expenses and make them into a cash flow diagram. I've shown you how to make the diagram and then how to enter things like title and axes information, which is very important in diagrams, make sure you label everything. If you are having trouble with it, just experiment with some by clicking on the chart and go to layout and you can see all these different things that you can do. So, if you are wanting to look a little differently, just experiment some. In this tutorial, I’ve shown you how to make a cash flow diagram from your monthly income and expenses.