Case Study Modeling Debt - Interest Cover and Breaches
- 02:32
This video calculates interest cover, a key metric for lenders.
Glossary
Debt modeling modelling Project finance RenewablesTranscript
We're going to do interest cover now. There are actually lots of ways of measuring interest cover. You can do it on a more profit or earnings basis, say using EBITDA, or you can use it on a cashflow basis. It should really be a bit clearer from the loan documentation or our assumptions tab. We're going to assume that we're going to do it on CFADs. So you could see we like the normal tactic, which is an IF error.
We're gonna say the cover will be based on CFADs and its ability to cover the total interest. And we've got total interest here. You can see the IF error is gonna be helpful again because it's going to grab that error. It's also gonna grab the error, which is generated from the flag, and it will also grab the error generated later on in the project where we may not have any interest expense at all because we may have paid down all of our debt. So it is quite useful. We've also gotta flip the sign and then indicate what happens. If it does encount an error, then make sure that's working.
I've then shortcut the breach line a little bit. It's exactly the same as the other ones. Where we say is the target, how's it compare against the interest cover? Do a bit of stress checking and you can see it breaches if the interest cover goes below 1.5. Just fine. And we're now ready to unify our breaches, which is to say we are going to see whether there are any breaches at all and how many breaches using this cell here. It's just gonna add up all of the breaches. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna look at the result of all of our analyses so far. And so wherever you see a line that says breach, we're gonna add those together.
And we've done a lot of them, so there's a lot of potential breaches there.
Okay, we'll pull that to the right and you can see breaches are starting to turn up. The idea of this is that it's gonna drive a data table where we say if there are any breaches at all, it's cause of concern, and it may be an indication that we've borrowed too much and well done. That brings us to the end of the debt tab, which is a major undertaking. We're now ready to start doubling back and filling in the gaps.