How to make a cash flow Sankey diagram

The statement of cash flows is the one financial statement people find hardest to read at a glance. Three sections — operating, investing, financing — each a mix of inflows and outflows, all netting to a single change in cash. A cash flow Sankey fixes that: every source of cash flows in from the left, every use flows out, and what's left is the net change in your cash balance, drawn as one honest ribbon. Here's how to build one from your own numbers.

Why a Sankey suits the cash flow statement

Unlike an income statement, the cash flow statement mixes positives and negatives freely — capital expenditure is an outflow, a new loan is an inflow, and the signs flip between sections. A table makes you do the arithmetic in your head. A Sankey does it visually: inflow ribbons enter and thicken your cash pool, outflow ribbons peel away, and the width of the surviving stream is your net change in cash. You see immediately whether operations funded your investing, or whether financing had to plug the gap.

Step 1 — Split cash into the three activities

Start with the three standard buckets. Operating activities is the cash your core business actually generated (net income adjusted for non-cash items and working capital). Investing activities is what you spent on or received from assets — capex, acquisitions, asset sales. Financing activities is money moving between you and your funders — debt drawn or repaid, equity raised, dividends and buybacks. Each bucket has both inflows and outflows, and that's exactly what the Sankey will separate.

Step 2 — Turn each line into an inflow or an outflow

A Sankey is just a list of flows, each with a source, a target and an amount. Model inflows as flowing into a central Cash node — Operating cash flow into Cash, Debt raised into Cash, Asset sales into Cash. Model outflows as flowing out of it — Cash into Capex, Cash into Debt repayment, Cash into Dividends. What doesn't get spent continues out of Cash into Net change in cash. You can type these rows directly or paste them straight from Excel or Google Sheets, one column for source, one for target, one for the amount.

Step 3 — Color outflows red, inflows and net cash green

Color is what makes the chart readable in a second. Put every use of cash — capex, debt repayment, dividends, buybacks — in red, keep the inflow ribbons and the central cash trunk neutral, and draw a positive net change in cash in green (or red if you burned cash for the period). In MakeCharts you can set this in a click or just ask the AI copilot in plain English to "color cash outflows red and the net change green," and the whole chart updates at once.

• Keep one central Cash node so inflows and outflows meet in the middle.
• Group small line items so the ribbons stay legible — aim for a dozen nodes or fewer.
• Draw capex, debt repayment and dividends as distinct red outflows.
• Let the net change in cash be the single stream that exits on the right.

Step 4 — Export and reuse next quarter

Export a crisp SVG for slides and print, or a PNG for docs and social — watermark-free on paid plans. Save the chart to the cloud and next quarter becomes a two-minute update: swap the amounts and the layout and colors are preserved. The same recipe scales from a personal cash flow to a public company's statement, which is why it pairs naturally with an income statement Sankey in the same deck.

That's the whole method. Once you can see cash as flows rather than a signed column of numbers, the question the statement is really answering — did the business fund itself this period, or not — stops being buried and becomes the first thing anyone reads.