One of the fundamental premises of financial reporting by business enterprises is that it should provide users with information that will assist them in predicting the amounts, timing and uncertainty of future cash flows of the enterprise. The requirement for alternative income measurements was partially justified by an assumed correspondence between the new information and the cash flow prediction objective. The existence of that correspondence, however, has not been precisely verified by the research to date. The overall objective of this research was to contribute additional evidence to address conflicts in the prior research findings, and additionally, to consider possible industry and firm-size effects on the ability to predict cash flow from alternative incomes.

A data base was compiled from COMPUSTAT tapes (historical cost), the Parker model restatement procedures (general price-level) and the Easman data base that used the Falkenstein-Weil restatement model (replacement cost). One conclusion was that the alternative income measurements produce different cash flow forecast errors. Overall, historical cost net income produced the lowest forecast errors for two approximations of cash flow. The inclusion of monetary gains/losses and holding gains/losses in net income did not improve predictions, and in one case worsened them.

Another conclusion was that a multiple linear regression model produced significantly lower forecast errors for both cash flow definitions. The simple linear and exponential regression prediction models did not produce different forecast errors.

Finally, both an industry effect and a firm-size effect were identified in the prediction of working capital from operations. When net income plus depreciation was the object of prediction, an industry effect was identified but not a firm-size effect.

The overall impact of these findings is that the alternative income measurements should be justified on some basis other than facilitating cash flow prediction. In fact, a random-walk cash flow prediction model performed better than any prediction based on net income. Financial accounting standards in the area of alternative income measurements should consider possible industry and firm-size differences. The choice of cash flow definition is apparently critical because different conclusions were obtained.