Capital budgeting

Capital budgeting, or investment appraisal, is the planning process used to determine whether an organization's long term investments such as new machinery, replacement machinery, new plants, new products, and research development projects are worth the funding of cash through the firm's capitalization structure (debt, equity or retained earnings). It is the process of allocating resources for major capital, or investment, expenditures. One of the primary goals of capital budgeting investments is to increase the value of the firm to the shareholders.

Many formal methods are used in capital budgeting, including the techniques such as

These methods use the incremental cash flows from each potential investment, or project. Techniques based on accounting earnings and accounting rules are sometimes used - though economists consider this to be improper - such as the accounting rate of return, and "return on investment." Simplified and hybrid methods are used as well, such as payback period and discounted payback period.

Present value

In economics, present value, also known as present discounted value, is the value of an expected income stream determined as of the date of valuation. The present value is always less than or equal to the future value because money has interest-earning potential, a characteristic referred to as the time value of money, except during times of negative interest rates, when the present value will be less than the future value. Time value can be described with the simplified phrase, “A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow”. Here, 'worth more' means that its value is greater. A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow because the dollar can be invested and earn a day's worth of interest, making the total accumulate to a value more than a dollar by tomorrow. Interest can be compared to rent. Just as rent is paid to a landlord by a tenant, without the ownership of the asset being transferred, interest is paid to a lender by a borrower who gains access to the money for a time before paying it back. By letting the borrower have access to the money, the lender has sacrificed the exchange value of this money, and is compensated for it in the form of interest. The initial amount of the borrowed funds (the present value) is less than the total amount of money paid to the lender.

Net present value

In finance, the net present value (NPV) or net present worth (NPW) is defined as the sum of the present values (PVs) of incoming and outgoing cash flows over a period of time. Incoming and outgoing cash flows can also be described as benefit and cost cash flows, respectively.

Time value of money dictates that time has an impact on the value of cash flows. In other words, a lender may give you 99 cents for the promise of receiving $1.00 a month from now, but the promise to receive that same dollar 20 years in the future would be worth much less today to that same person (lender), even if the payback in both cases was equally certain. This decrease in the current value of future cash flows is based on the market dictated rate of return. More technically, cash flows of nominal equal value over a time series result in different effective value cash flows that makes future cash flows less valuable over time. If for example there exists a time series of identical cash flows, the cash flow in the present is the most valuable, with each future cash flow becoming less valuable than the previous cash flow. A cash flow today is more valuable than an identical cash flow in the future because a present flow can be invested immediately and begin earning returns, while a future flow cannot.

Rate of return

In finance, return is a profit on an investment. It comprises any change in value and interest or dividends or other such cash flows which the investor receives from the investment. It may be measured either in absolute terms (e.g., dollars) or as a percentage of the amount invested. The latter is also called the holding period return.

A loss instead of a profit is described as a negative return.

Rate of return is a profit on an investment over a period of time, expressed as a proportion of the original investment. The time period is typically a year, in which case the rate of return is referred to as annual return.

To compare returns over time periods of different lengths on an equal basis, it is useful to convert each return into an annual equivalent rate of return, or annualised return. This conversion process is called annualisation, described below.

Return on investment (ROI) is return per dollar invested. It is a measure of investment performance, as opposed to size (c.f. return on equity, return on assets, return on capital employed).

Internal rate of return

The internal rate of return (IRR) or economic rate of return (ERR) is a method of calculating rate of return. The term internal refers to the fact that its calculation does not incorporate environmental factors (e.g., the interest rate or inflation).

It is also called the discounted cash flow rate of return (DCFROR).

In the context of savings and loans, the IRR is also called the effective interest rate.

Definition

The internal rate of return on an investment or project is the "annualized effective compounded return rate" or rate of return that makes the net present value of all cash flows (both positive and negative) from a particular investment equal to zero. It can also be defined as the discount rate at which the present value of all future cash flow is equal to the initial investment or, in other words, the rate at which an investment breaks even.

Equivalently, the IRR of an investment is the discount rate at which the net present value of costs (negative cash flows) of the investment equals the net present value of the benefits (positive cash flows) of the investment.