Course Three

Excellence in Financial Management

Course 3: Capital Budgeting Analysis

Prepared by: Matt H. Evans, CPA, CMA, CFM

This course provides a concise overview of capital budgeting analysis. This course is recommended for 2 hours of Continuing Professional Education. In order to receive credit, you will need to pass a multiple choice exam which is administered over the internet at www.exinfm.com/training

A companion toll free course can be accessed by dialing 1-877-689-4097, option 3, ID 752.

Chapter

1

The Overall Process

Capital Expenditures

Whenever we make an expenditure that generates a cash flow benefit for more than one year, this is a capital expenditure. Examples include the purchase of new equipment, expansion of production facilities, buying another company, acquiring new technologies, launching a research & development program, etc., etc., etc. Capital expenditures often involve large cash outlays with major implications on the future values of the company. Additionally, once we commit to making a capital expenditure it is sometimes difficult to back-out. Therefore, we need to carefully analyze and evaluate proposed capital expenditures.

The Three Stages of Capital Budgeting Analysis

Capital Budgeting Analysis is a process of evaluating how we invest in capital assets; i.e. assets that provide cash flow benefits for more than one year. We are trying to answer the following question:

Will the future benefits of this project be large enough to justify the investment given the risk involved?

It has been said that how we spend our money today determines what our value will be tomorrow. Therefore, we will focus much of our attention on present values so that we can understand how expenditures today influence values in the future. A very popular approach to looking at present values of projects is discounted cash flows or DCF. However, we will learn that this approach is too...