Blog

We share our latest thinking and discuss current topics in project finance. We welcome your contribution – feel free to comment online or contact the blogger with your comments.

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Australian Solomons Gold - major milestone

By Nick Crawley on May 1 2009

One of our great mining clients have just now achieved a major milestone in the development of the Gold Ridge project. During these well publisiced difficult times for resource companies seeking financing the team at ASG have made an important announcement regarding a newly signed Mandate Letter from the International Finance Corporation (”IFC”). With the IFC being a member of the World Bank Group this announcment clearly demonstrates the socio-economic robustness of the project which the team at Australian Solomons Gold have spent several years pulling together. We have been working with the project team and senior management over the past two years and have seen them triumph over a range of issues to be expected when developing a project in what is widely regarded as a challenging environment. Well done guys! Here is more information about ASG, IFC and the recent announcement.... Read more

Add a new dimension to your model with conditional formatting.

By Anna Kim on April 29 2009 | No comments A recent project has reiterated to me how useful conditional formatting is in financial models, the amount of information that can be relayed through dynamic formatting and how it increases the efficiency of updating a model is really under-utilised and so I thought I might highlight when you could think about using standard and easy to use feature.... Read more

Modelling Best Practice - why is it so hard?

By Nick Crawley on April 28 2009 | 1 comment Since the early 1990’s I have watched a number of companies around the world attempt to unify spreadsheet modelling practices within their own teams, companies as well as sell into other organisations. As yet there is no unified approach to financial modelling, this shouldn’t be hard so lets take a look at what has happened.... Read more

Free financial modelling training..is not a bad thing!

By Nick Crawley on April 23 2009 | No comments I like it when I get something for free. Its hard not to right? I also get a lot of satisfaction when participants complete our financial modelling courses and go away armed with an approach that will make them instantly more productive and their analysis accurate when they get back to the office. Commercially this generally results in a referral - so a happy student is a good thing!... Read more

Modelling using different keyboards

By Nick Crawley on April 22 2009 | No comments Recently I have had the pleasure to deliver in-house training on Project Finance Modelling to the European Investment Bank (the “EIB“). The EIB, located in Luxembourg has fantastic internal training facilities and offers the choice of several different keyboards for participants to work on. The experience of switching from one keyboard to another highlighted to me that the differences between the layouts can cause a fair amount of inefficiency especially for financial modelling in English. I can understand that different languages require different characters and that some characters will be used more frequently in say Hungarian than English but I question the need to change the operation of non-alphanumeric characters. Although I would qualify all of this by saying that European keyboards are still much easier to solve a circular reference on than when presented with a Japanese keyboard!... Read more

10 errors in interest charge calculations

By Nick Crawley on April 21 2009 | No comments Interest charge calculations should be quite simple but their calculation seems to be a common source of error. I thought I would share with you a few of the interest related errors that I would look for if I wanted to quickly find a mistake in your financial model. This list is a subset of the list which constitutes the “Check Interest Calculations” consideration which is 1 of Navigator’s 100 point check list applied before a model is released to a client.... Read more

5 reasons to use OpenOffice rather than Excel or Google

By Nick Crawley on April 15 2009 | No comments Having explored the capability and also limitations of Google Spreadsheets I have started evaluating the spreadsheet element of Open-Office and I am pleasantly surprised. If you recognise that Excel 2007 is not a great piece of software for the delivery of professional financial modelling services but think that Google spreadsheet isn’t quite what you need then Open-Office spreadsheet could well be your solution.... Read more

2 Project Finance Books you can’t live without.

By Nick Crawley on April 6 2009 | 1 comment I am often asked to recommend good books on Project Finance. I can confirm they are out there …but are hard to find! ... Read more

5 reasons Google will replace Microsoft Excel

By Nick Crawley on April 6 2009 | No comments When I started using spreadsheets the year was 1985 and the software of choice at the time was called “Visi-Calc”, I can’t say this with too much authority…because I was only 10 years old. However this is what I used to keep track of my savings and the compounding interest for the soon to be released 148k ZX Spectrum - I was quite focussed.... Read more

Modelling P50 versus P90 wind profiles

By Nick Crawley on April 1 2009 | No comments Modelling P50 and P90 wind profiles is generally done poorly in the models I am sent. This is maybe one reason we are producing so many financial models for wind projects at the moment! Depending on your budget and purpose there are quite a lot of resources on the web for understanding Wind Economics, the template model from Windustry has some interesting features for a quick evaluation but I would not recomend this for any form of investment decision.... Read more

8 reasons to rebuild a financial model

By Nick Crawley on April 1 2009 | No comments A question I regularly find myself answering with our clients, both new and established, is “should we rebuild an existing financial model” [or refine an existing model to take into account updated transaction structure, environmental and or market circumstances]. If you acknowledge the potentially huge impact of Model Risk or value process efficiency and third party perception the answer is a resounding YES YES YES.... Read more