Read the waterfall chart – Cash Flow

Read the waterfall chartCash FlowYou can read the plan as a picture and use it for the conversation the grid is too dense for.The **cash flow waterfall chart** is the same data as the grid, drawn. One bar per period, showing what that period did to the production's position, with milestone markers along it.What a waterfall shows that a table does notA grid of forty columns is read one number at a time. The chart is read in a glance, and three things jump out of it that are genuinely hard to see in the table:- **the shape** — a long shallow drain versus a short violent one; - **the turn** — the period the production stops losing and starts recovering; - **the outliers** — the one bar that dwarfs its neighbours, usually an instalment or a single large payment.Reading it with the milestonesThe markers are what make it a production document rather than a finance one. A trough is abstract; a trough **that begins at start of shoot and ends at the second fund instalment** is a sentence you can act on.That is the reading to take away: not how deep, but *between which two events* — see [show milestones on the plan](/kb/article/show-milestones-on-the-plan).Change the period to change the questionThe chart follows the period granularity. Monthly gives you the arc of the production; weekly gives you the weeks the shoot is actually tight in.A plan that looks comfortable monthly can have a two-week hole in it, and the weekly chart is where that shows — see [read the cash flow grid](/kb/article/read-the-cash-flow-grid).What it is forShowing people. It is the artefact for a financing meeting, a bank conversation or a partner discussion — the version of the plan that can be understood by someone who has never opened KOSMA.Read the numbers in the grid; make the argument with the chart.Markdown