Investment Appraisal Flashcards
Long-term planning
What are the accounting methods of investment appraisal?
- Payback period
- Accounting Rate of Return (ARR)
What’s a capital investment?
Investment that typically requires a substantial sum of money and is expected to generate economic returns over a long period of time
Investment appraisal limitations
- Depends on accruacy of future expectations
- Decision can only be as good as the available information shows
- Payback period and ARR may have conflicting suggestions on action
What is payback period?
Calculates length of time expected to recover investment cost (similar to break-even concept)
Based on cash flows
Assumptions of payback period
- Projects are indivisible (firm must invest full amount required for each project, or none at all)
- Projects can’t be delayed (opportunity can’t appear again later once we choose not to invest)
- Projects can’t be abandoned (can’t stop a project once it has started)
- Profits, losses and cash flows arise evenly throughout time (annual basis)
Payback period formula
- Convert income statement info to cash flow by adjusting for depreciation and add back to P/L figures
- Cumulative cash flows
- Payback period in years and months
= Year before Breakeven + (Unrecovered/Cash Flow in Recovery Year)
What are the advantages of payback period?
- Useful when business has cash constraints to invest and need immediate recover from investment to invest in other projects
- Cash flow basis, doesn’t include irrelevant cost like depreciation
What are the disadvantages of payback period?
- Need to compare one payback period to another to make a decision (can’t tell if 3.5 years is good/bad)
- Ignores absolute size of investment outlay and cash flows after
- Ignores size and direction of cash flows after payback period
- Doesn’t take into account the time value of money
What is the Accounting Rate of Return (ARR)?
AKA Return on Investment (ROI)
Ratio of average annual profit of project to investment in the project
No need to adjust for depreciation and non-cash flows
ARR Formula
Average Annual Profit/(Initial investment + resale/2) x 100%
What are the advantages of ARR?
- Fairly simple to calculate like payback period
- Familiar to manager (paying bonuses, set performance targets)
- Related to invetors’ required rate of return and based on profit figures which are widely used and understood
What are the disadvantages of ARR?
- Need to compare one ARR to another to make decision (can’t tell if 20% ARR is good/bad)
- Ignores absolute size of investment outlay and profit & cash flows after
- Uses profit so includes irrelevant costs like depreciation
- Subjective and depends on choice of investment calculation alongside accounting policies)
- Doesn’t take into account the time value of money
What are discounted cash flows?
Technique that only uses relevant costs & revenues and considers time value of money
Net Present Value (NPV) compared to Payback Period and ARR
Superior technique to make capital investment decisions bc considers magnitude of projects (projects w/ greater positive NPVs increase even more wealth compared to smaller NPVs)
Internal Rate of Return (IRR) purpose1
Assesses risk of investment decision related to discount rate used to reflect time value of money in NPV calculation