5.2 Liquidity planning

Liquidity is defined from the company's liabilities to liquid assets. The company must be able to meet its current obligations at all times. Even a profitable business can become insolvent - illiquid. This can happen, for example, if a main customer itself defaults on payments or a loan can no longer be serviced on time. Liquidity problems are among the biggest problems and most frequent causes of insolvency. Young companies are often affected by this because they do not have enough equity capital available. To prevent this from happening, liquidity must be planned. 

Liquidity planning must be carried out systematically. The liquidity calculation must be based on a monthly business management statement (BWA) and the profit and loss statement. All income and expenditure must be compared. A prerequisite for this is a meaningful cost accounting system. The monthly surplus (surplus cover) or deficit (deficit cover) results from the difference between income and expenditure.

The calculation parameters for liquidity planning are receipts = payments in and expenditures = payments out. These directly change the available financial resources (cash or cash equivalents). The actual time of payment is decisive for the actual recording or allocation of incoming payments and outgoing payments, as this results in a direct change in the cash balance in the company. It is not the date of invoicing that is significant, but the actual payments in and payments out.

In order to facilitate planning in a business plan, it is initially sufficiently accurate to assume the income statement data as the basic data for liquidity planning. The P&L data should be considered and explained from a liquidity impact perspective. If payment delays are to be expected in revenues or in disbursements, these should be explicitly named.

Depreciation and imputed costs that increase expenses in the income statement must be considered separately in liquidity planning. As these are non-cash transactions, they increase liquidity.

In order to determine liquidity, all incoming payments must be compared to all outgoing payments. In order to ensure liquidity at all times, the sum of incoming payments must always be greater than the sum of outgoing payments. The company thus builds up a liquidity reserve. If the sum of outgoing payments exceeds the sum of incoming payments, capital must be injected. This is done through financial planning or capital requirements planning. The sum of all negative individual amounts or the operating result in the P&L results in the total capital requirement over the planning period.