Level 8

Level 8 seeks to introduce a more polished results format that portrays info and results in a much neater fashion. Your summary page, while not being as technical as the actual modelling, is just as important. It the visual basis for others that seek to further their knowledge on a potential or current investment/development. It is the most personalised part of any investment appraisal and should reflect the most critical information that you or your management would like to see, whether that is numeric values or through a more infographic approach.

One of the analogies I use for modelling is to imagine yourself being an artisan watchmaker. You are hand crafting something of which people are very unfamiliar with the inner workings (despite the majority of your blood sweat and tears being put into this aspect). Every watch serves the same purpose and (should!) tick the same…but what drives watch sales? The face, the outer design. Some prefer a classic slick feel, some others love a bit more functionality with additional results such as secondary time zones etc. This is the exact same as modelling, know who you are modelling for and their preferences.

In level 8 I have provided a more comprehensive analysis of the numbers on the back of the same numbers we have been looking at previously. I have not changed anything from level 7 except for a few inputs, we have the exact same functionality as before, but we are looking at the same thing in a different fashion. I personally find excel graphs to be very clunky and awkward but decided against using any 3rd party add-ins or software for this website, just to keep everyone on the same playing field. There are much better and informative graphs available if you are in a place where you want to maximise your visualised results.

One of the arts to good results summary in excel is making it print friendly. If you go to the ‘View’ tab and select ‘Page Break Preview’ from the ribbon, you can see where you print lines lie on your spreadsheet. Once you can get these in order you are all set for that quick print option, without having to spend too much time highlighting and formatting cells, and avoid ending up with completely mismatched numbers and text on your hardcopy.