Forecasting Daily Cash Flows in a Company - Shortcoming in the Research Field and Solution Exploration

Abstract

Daily cash flow forecasting is important for maintaining company financial liquidity, improves resource allocation, and aids financial managers in decision making. On the one hand, it helps to avoid excessive amounts of cash outstanding on company’s account, and on the other hand, it helps to avoid liquidity issues. This area isn’t popular for research though - literature on the topic is limited and has a major shortcoming - in most cases publicly unavailable datasets are used. It can be attributed to generally smaller availability of financial data than in other fields, but there are two issues arising from such situation - not reproducible results of existing work and the area being less approachable by new potential researchers. The goal of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, it is reviewing existing literature, methods, and datasets used, together with details provided on those datasets. Secondly, it is exploring publicly available datasets to be used in further research, containing either cash flows directly or data from which cash flows can be derived.