Case Study Modeling Debt - Total DSCR
- 05:18
This video calculates DSCR, a key metric for lenders.
Glossary
Debt DSCR modeling modelling Project finance RenewablesTranscript
A major output of the model is the DSCR. And what we're gonna do now is initially do the total DSCR, which has its own target, and then individual DSCR targets for the different tranches. Once we've done that, we've got the lifeline time loan coverage ratio and interest cover. And what we'll do then is create a key metric for this model, which is are there any breaches in the life of the project? And any breaches would then indicate that we've perhaps pushed leverage a bit too far.
To get the overall DSCR. We're going to grab the total interest expense and mandatory payments. You could say, oh, that's the DSRA, but that would be a little error.
The DSCR is based within the year I this column, whereas you might recall when we did the DSRA, it was based on next year, so anticipated next year's debt service. So to get the total interest expense, we'll go and fetch and from within the year, interest from the senior debt and interest from the junior debt. We'll do the same thing for the mandatories and then we'll add that all up, pull to the right and see if it makes sense. And it does. Those numbers will hopefully be familiar. They look exactly like the DSRA requirement. Okay, they're just in a different timing because of the timing issues we talked about just now.
We're going to cover this with our CFADs. So let's just go and grab our CFADs. We, we could just aim at the CFADs when we're doing our work here, but when we built the model, we thought it would be nice to have it here so we could talk it through. You can see that DSCR for the first two years is not gonna make all that much sense.
We have negative CFADs, although that might change when we hook everything up again and we have no debt to service.
What's nice is this is gonna be handled by the flags that we built up earlier. We've said that while the interest during construction i,e; the construction phase is happening, then the targets are not going to be measured.
This means that when we come down here and we find the total DSCR, we're gonna find that there's no DSCR in the first two years. And then in subsequent years we're going to measure the DSCR. We then need to indicate whether there's a breach on the next line. And in terms of kind of Excel tactics, we do need to be a bit careful with these first two years. If we were to employ an IF statement and say if the flag is wrong, put a zero, then it would be difficult to interpret the next line. Because the next line would see this as zero.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna start with an if error, which is slightly unusual.
We're gonna say debt service coverage ratio. That's already gonna lead to an error. Okay? But even if it didn't, what we're gonna do is we're gonna force it into an error by dividing by the flag. And even if the debt service coverage ratio equation did work and numbers made sense and didn't create an error already, then by dividing by the zero from the flag, that would force an error.
And what we'll do is we'll tell it to pick up an n/a.
Now like I say, let's say I changed the debt service there to be a number. You can see it's still picking up an n/a and that's because it's dividing by the zero in the flag. And that's useful because it means that it doesn't matter what happens to our model. This will always say n/a. And the reason n/a is so useful there is because it won't be picked up by the IF statement here. And so we won't get a breach by mistake or a non breach or something strange happening with our test.
Now the test is quite straightforward. We can say if the target is greater than the result, then we have a breach, otherwise we don't.
You can see that's revealed a little error here, which I'll fix. And you can see that we're obviously in breach every year and that's just because the debt service has ended up as a negative, which has forced the DSCR into a negative. So if I go back in, attach a times minus 1 and we'd have to do that within the bracket, pull it to the right, see what happens. Yep, that is doing much better. And you can see that things take a turn for the worse in terms of DSCR once the grace period expires. And you can see here we're in breach, but obviously everything is still yet to change because we haven't hooked up the circular and missing figure kind of parts of the model.