CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR ENSURING THE FINANCIAL SUSTAINABILITY OF OPERATING ACTIVITIES

The presentation of the concept of “financial sustainability” and criteria for its assessment is given. A comparison of the understanding of sustainability in fundamental and economic sciences is made, it is shown their difference, which is the assessment of the stability of the system. In fundamental sciences, sustainability is correlated with the limit, which is the threshold value of acceptable fluctuations of leading variables; in economic sciences, sustainability is mainly a positive growth rate of leading financial indicators. It is noted that the limit understanding of sustainability in economic activity has application and manifests itself as the management of processes mainly by deviations with the establishment of their threshold values. The hypothesis is put forward - achievement of financial sustainability is possible by ensuring the sustainability of single and aggregate cash flows, which set the stability of operating activities. The linkage between financial and operational activities is revealed by establishing the linkage between the operational cycle of transformation of raw materials into finished products (OCPP) and the financial cycle of capital turnover (FCOK). It is shown that the work of the whole chain of the OCPP processes is provided by the aggregate cash flow formed from internal and external sources. Each OCPP process requires cash investments, which justifies the decomposition of the total cash flow into unit flows. The change in process costs leads to a change in unit and total cash flows - fluctuation relative to the money allocated to processes and to the entire OCPP in the operating budget. We propose techniques and an algorithm for finding the correspondence between the possible spread of the limit on costs by processes and the total flow.