Other Investing Activities

Category

Cash Flow

Units

Currency

US-GAAP elements

PaymentsForProceedsFromOtherInvestingActivities

Reference

ASC 230, Statement of Cash Flows (investing activities)

Source

Reported in SEC EDGAR filings (US-GAAP XBRL taxonomy)

Other investing activities is the residual line in the investing section of the cash flow statement. It captures the net cash from investing transactions that the company does not present on their own lines, such as small loans made or collected, insurance proceeds for damaged property, deposits on future asset purchases, and settlements of certain hedges tied to investments.

It can be an inflow or an outflow in any period, and it is usually small compared with capital expenditures and acquisitions.

ASC 230 defines investing activities to include lending money and collecting it, and acquiring and disposing of productive assets and of investments in other entities. Anything in that category that a company does not break out lands here. The XBRL element PaymentsForProceedsFromOtherInvestingActivities is written from the payment side: a positive value represents a net cash outflow and a negative value a net inflow. That is the reverse of the sign shown on the statement, so raw XBRL values need to be flipped before they are added to other investing lines.

Contents vary by company and year. Examples often reported here include proceeds from corporate-owned life insurance policies, collections of notes receivable, purchases of or proceeds from venture investments too small to show separately, and changes in restricted deposits held for investment purposes. ASU 2016-15 settled several of these, for example that insurance settlement proceeds are classified by the nature of the loss, so proceeds for a destroyed building are investing while those for business interruption are operating.

On its own the line rarely drives analysis. It deserves a look when it becomes large relative to the rest of the section, since that means a material activity is not being disclosed in detail. The notes, or the liquidity discussion in the MD&A, usually explain unusually large amounts. When comparing investing cash flow across companies, remember that one company's "other" may be another company's separately reported line.