Models - Monthly or Quarterly / Annual

If you have monthly financial data that is feeding into your model do you typically build your models with everything calculating monthly or just aggregate and have your model calculate everything quarterly or annually?

And if you do calculate everything monthly, how in the world do you build the model so that it can actually calculate sensitivity tables in a reasonable time? I could see quarterly being a compromise but that still seems like it a ton of calculations that would take quite a long time.

17 Comments
 

You can only do monthly with access to confi'd management. I wouldn't get too hung up on it.

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Best Response

When I build preliminary LBO models for our deals, I'll just do yearly projections and go 5 years out. If we decide to sign an LOI, I'll include monthly calculations for everything (IS, BS, cash flows, and debt schedule). Sometimes I'll do a revenue build that feeds into all of it, where I'll calculate and show monthly historical, actual, and projected rev/gp by customer. I'll usually just do monthly projections a year out from time of close, then yearly after that.

I'll usually leave sensitivity tables out of the LBO model for monthly. I have an IRR page that does a terminal value calc, ownership summary, and equity IRR based on the model output and ownership structure. There's really no need to do sensitivity calcs by month if you are only projecting monthly one year out.

 

Recently had this pop up for me as well - built out a quarterly operating model but had to show outputs etc in annual. Simple solution is having a quarterly operating model and then some sort of annual output tab where you roll up the quarterly data using a "sum-if" function. So for example, you would have 2011 - 2014 as your headers and then use these values to drive your sum-if calculation. Trick is to have a grouped row in your quarterly operating model that spits out the "year" for each quarter (think a "year" function should do this). Hope this helps.

 

With shortcuts this shouldn't take you long at all...

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This is seems to be a difference between bankers and capital markets people - bankers, realizing the pain-in-the-arse nature of doing what you're describing, will do QQQQ QQQQ QQQQ and then YYY off to the side - cap. markets people prefer the other way.

in terms of modeling, i would do the quarters first with a spacer for the annuals if you MUST do it in this format, and then do the annuals later.

 

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