Time to do a DCF?

From a new Excel sheet to a fully-functioning & balancing DCF with a 5-year projection maybe a day or two?.

A DCF is literally only a few lines in a model. It really depends on the operating model you're building i.e. how granular you get with the revenue and cost build-up, asset and debt schedules. A simple 3 statement model (with just y/y growth driving revenue) + DCF shouldn't take more than an hour, including extracting historicals.

As others have stated, it depends on what you want. When I build a DCF to value a potential company, we only need a quick and dirty DCF, so it takes me about an hour. Most of that time is me just being very anal about triple checking everything.

IB DCFs will naturally take longer as they are more detailed. You have a fiduciary responsibility to your client, so a quick and dirty DCF will most likely not cut it.

This should take approximately 2 minutes.

Agreed with the others, maybe some additional time would be spent looking up comps to use in the WACC.

But as other OPs have mentioned a quick and dirty DCF from scratch probably should take an hour or two, again all variable on the complexity.

The DCF tab alone should take less than an hour from scratch, including comps for beta/wacc. I don't see how you could make a DCF more complicated than that.

The operating model can take anywhere from a couple hours to a few days or even a week.

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about tree fiddy

.. no seriously, as other people have stated, it should only take about an hour

OP, if you're just working off growth rates/margins, you should get to the point where you can crank out a working DCF in less than an hour (ideally closer to 30-45 minutes) starting from a blank sheet. Now if you're going to have other tabs (revenue, expenses, NWC/CAPEX, WACC) and build a basic operating model then add on an hour. If you're going to get more granular/do all three statements then it'll take as long as your boss says it will (could be needed tomorrow or in a week).

depends how many redds apple ales u have consumed

DCF is extremely short - its the detail that goes into the operating model (for instance, doing debt / working capital / capex / D&A / tax schedules or just doing 3 statement generic, and how you project stuff) that makes modeling take a long time

Not long at all to make a generic one. The time consumption will come from support in making thoughtful assumptions.

LBOs are more time consuming.

In either respect, most banks have a decent template model to work from to take out a lot of the monotonous aspects, allowing you to focus on assumptions rather than tying financial statements together.