Basic Overview

Description

Internal rate of return (IRR) is a metric of profitability for potential investments. Internal rate of return is a discount rate that sets the net present value (NPV) of all future cash flows the investment equal to zero. An approximate solution is found using numerical iteration.

Signature

IRR(Node [, Guess])


Parameters

  • Node: Yearly Cash Flows. At least one of the cash flows must be negative and at least one positive.
  • Guess: (optional, defaults to 10%) is a first guess at the rate.

Example

We have project with following cash-flows.

'CF'=

YearCF
2018-10000
20191155
20205000
20217000

Our goal is to find a discount rate with which the discounted cash flows sum-up to zero:

IRR('CF')=

YearTotals
2020-23%
202112%

The IRR function tells us the rate is 12%. The result for Cash Flows up to year 2020 is not interesting for us and can be filtered out with FILTER function.