Among the various changes expected in the upcoming version of the Brazilian corporate law, the substitution of the statement of changes in financial position by the cash flow statement (CFS) stands as one of the most impacting innovations. The CFS is published by few companies in the country and its format, its potential as an instrument for liquidity analysis, as well as possible methods of deriving operating cash flow from it have not been sufficiently explored in the existent literature. The authors propose that the use of ratios obtained from items of the CFS lead to data about financial liquidity, since the operating cash flow is the most important measure of the statement. This study classifies the ratios into four different categories whose purposes vary from determining the business debt payment capacity to the cash return rate. In order to test the CFS financial analysis validity, the authors applied the proposed method to data extracted from CVRD and CEMig reports. Finally, before presenting ideas for future work, this study discusses the issue of classifying cash flow into operating, financing, and investing categories, a problem that accounting committees will face soon.
cash flow statement; liquidity and solvency; cash return rate; performance valuation; activity format; classification criteria
