The role of the cash flow in evaluation of the real investment project

This article discusses the importance of cash flow to evaluate the efficiency of real investment projects. The main aim of this study is to synthesize and develop the methodological foundations of the definition and evaluation of cash flow from the sale of real investment projects. Based on the analysis and synthesis of existing approaches to the definition of the «cash flow» it has been proposed to consider it as an economic category, which reflects the economic benefit from the sale of real investment projects. A prerequisite for this is the need to take account of cash flow for all types of business enterprises (operating, financial, investment). The most fully meets these requirements residual cash flow, which is proposed to use to evaluate the effectiveness of real investment projects in the calculation of individual indicators in order to obtain more reliable results.This study can be continued in the direction of clarifying the approach to discounting cash flows when determining their present value.