What it measures
Free cash flow is cash from operations minus capital expenditure, the money a business generated from actually running, minus what it spent maintaining and growing its own equipment, property, and other long-term assets.
It matters because profit on paper (net income) can differ meaningfully from actual cash in hand, a company can report a profit while still spending heavily on new equipment, leaving little real cash left over, or the reverse. FCF is the harder number to dress up.
A worked example
A company generates 900,000,000 in cash from operations and spends 250,000,000 on capital expenditure for the year. Free cash flow: 900,000,000 − 250,000,000 = 650,000,000.
How Kobo & Cents uses it
Free cash flow sits in the valuation and growth category. A company that's profitable on paper but consistently weak on free cash flow is exactly the kind of gap the explainability panel is built to call out directly, rather than leaving a user to notice it themselves by comparing two separate numbers.