What is working capital?
Working capital can be calculated as current assets minus current liabilities. A firm’s working capital is the money it has available to meet current obligations (those due in less than a year). A firm with a great deal of working capital is in little danger of failing in the near future, but enormous working capital over a prolonged period could also imply excessively conservative management. Working capital, after all, is short-term in nature and hasn’t been put to work in the company’s profit-making business operations. As with most measures of corporate well being, this one varies by industry and even by season.
Working capital is a measurement of an entity’s current assets, after subtracting its liabilities. Sometimes referred to as operating capital, it is a valuation of the amount of liquidity a business or organization has for the running and building of the business. Generally speaking, companies with higher amounts of working capital are better positioned for success. They have the liquid assets needed to expand their business operations as desired. Sometimes, a company will have a large amount of assets, but have very little with which to build the business and improve processes. Even a profitable company may have this problem. This can occur when a company has assets that are not easy to convert into cash. Working capital can be expressed as a positive or negative number. When a company has more debts than current assets, it has negative working capital. When current assets outweigh debts, a company has positive working capital. Changes in working capital will impact a business’ cash f
Working capital refers to the cash a business requires for day-to-day operations, or, more specifically, for financing the conversion of raw materials into finished goods, which the company sells for payment. Among the most important items of working capital are levels of inventory, accounts receivable, and accounts payable. Analysts look at these items for signs of a company’s efficiency and financial strength. Take a simplistic case: a spaghetti sauce company uses $100 to build up its inventory of tomatoes, onions, garlic, spices, etc. A week later, the company assembles the ingredients into sauce and ships it out. A week after that, the checks arrive from customers. That $100, which has been tied up for two weeks, is the company’s working capital. The quicker the company sells the spaghetti sauce, the sooner the company can go out and buy new ingredients, which will be made into more sauce sold at a profit. If the ingredients sit in inventory for a month, company cash is tied-up and
Firms need cash to pay for all their day-to-day activities. They have to pay wages, pay for raw materials, pay bills and so on. The money available to them to do this is known as the firms working capital. The main sources of working capital are the current assets as these are the short-term assets that the firm can use to generate cash. However, the firm also has current liabilities and so these have to be taken account of when working out how much working capital a firm has at its disposal.
