Case Study Modeling Debt - Flags
- 02:59
This video builds a debt waterfall from EBITDA to ending cash.
Glossary
Debt modeling modelling Project finance RenewablesTranscript
We're through to the debt part of the model, which is very high complexity, and so this will definitely be a multi-part video.
The first thing we need is a series of flags, some of which we have, some of which are implied, and some of which we need to calculate from scratch. We have a grace period, and what that means is that the principal repayment on the debt will not commence until the end of the grace period. The end of the grace period is 53. That means the first repayment of principle should be in 54, and we are going to govern that in our model with a flag.
Renewables projects will have a grace period on their debt to allow the project to have maybe teething troubles in its first operational year or years and not break any covenants. These will be negotiated upfront, so it's not like the project has its wobble in its first years and says, oh, can we have a grace period? No, the grace period has been in place since the start of the project and anticipate some of the problems or ramping up of the project and its lack of scale.
This flag here will need to have a grace period of yes, yes, yes, yes, and then no. This means we can create an if and we can say if this one bigger and this one locked and no, otherwise yes. If I pull that to the right, should find the grace period is in effect until the end of 53, and then we're gonna have to start making principle repayments on debt.
The IDC flag can be fetched.
We created the IDC flag in the source and uses, so let's go and get it from there. And see it's over here on row seven, so we can just copy that in. Eventually, on the debt tab, we are going to end up measuring some of our key outputs such as DSCR.
In the initial years of the project where we're spending a lot of money on CapEx. We're going to find that measures such as DSCR don't make any sense. There is no debt service as such, and we may have negative cash flows. This is gonna mean that the DSCR lifetime coverage just don't make any sense in those years and covenants of rules probably wouldn't expect any kind of reporting on them. What we can do by implication is we can say 1 minus this one, we'll probably be this one.
The logic is that while we're in the construction phase, it doesn't make any sense to report the metrics around debt coverage.