Accounting and finance · Level 4, managers and decision makers
Investment appraisal techniques
Payback, net present value and internal rate of return, and when each one misleads.
- 1modules
- 2.5CPD hours
- 60guided minutes
- Freealways
About this course
Investment appraisal answers one question: should we spend this money on this, rather than on something else or on nothing at all. The techniques are straightforward arithmetic. The difficulty is entirely in the assumptions people put into them.
This course covers payback, accounting rate of return, net present value and internal rate of return, the time value of money that underpins the last two, and the sunk cost fallacy that overrides all of them in real meetings.
What you will be able to do
- Calculate payback, net present value and internal rate of return
- Explain the time value of money and discounting
- Select the right technique for a decision
- Recognise sunk costs and exclude them
Modules
Assessment and certificate
Knowledge check after each module and a final assessment at 80 per cent, with unlimited attempts.
A free digital certificate with a verification code that any employer can check, plus an entry on your CPD record.
Questions
Why discount future cash at all?
Because a pound today is genuinely worth more than a pound in five years. It could be earning in the meantime, inflation erodes what the later pound buys, and the later pound might never arrive. Discounting puts future amounts into today's money so that sums separated by years can honestly be compared.
We have already spent two hundred thousand pounds. Should that affect the decision?
No. That money is gone whatever you now decide, so it is a sunk cost and it belongs nowhere in the appraisal. The only question is whether the future cash from continuing beats the future cash from stopping. This is the most commonly and expensively broken rule in business, because abandoning a project feels like admitting the earlier spend was wasted.