ROI Calculator
Input your investment and return amounts to instantly calculate gain/loss and your return on investment percentage.
What is a return on investment calculator?
Return on investment (ROI) is the fundamental driving force behind any business or financial undertaking. Whenever you invest resources into anything, like money or time, it’s important to fully understand what returns or benefits you’ll get from it beforehand.
An ROI calculator estimates the ROI of a particular investment, project, or business initiative. ROI is a performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency or profitability of your investment.
You compare the amount of return relative to the investment’s cost. An ROI calculator simplifies this process, offering a quick way to assess potential gains or losses.
Benefits of an ROI calculator
Using an ROI calculator has numerous benefits for businesses and investors. The tool helps you make informed decisions about allocating resources and assess the effectiveness of various initiatives.
Here are the top 5 benefits of using an ROI calculator:
Quick and easy financial evaluation
An ROI calculator offers rapid insights. Quickly assess the financial viability of an investment and make informed decisions without needing complex financial expertise.
Informed resource allocation
It helps you prioritize investments that yield the highest returns. This focuses limited resources like time, money, and labor on the most profitable opportunities.
Risk mitigation
Calculating ROI beforehand helps you avoid unprofitable ventures and minimizes financial risks. It enables “what-if” analysis to understand different potential outcomes and impacts.
Objective comparison of multiple investments
The tool allows for direct, data-driven comparisons of multiple investment options. This means your decisions are based on clear metrics rather than subjective factors.
Tracking and measuring performance
An ROI calculator enables ongoing performance tracking. You can compare expected returns with actual outcomes. This helps you stay on course and make adjustments as needed to achieve financial goals.
How to calculate ROI
The simplest way to calculate ROI is this: Divide the profit by the total investment amount and multiply the result by 100%.
Profit is calculated by taking the current value of the investment and subtracting the total capital investment.
A more complete formula for ROI looks like this:
Example:
If you invest $1,000 into a project and get back $1,300, your profit would be $300. Dividing the $300 profit with your original investment of $1,000 would give you an ROI of 30%.
It's also possible to get a negative ROI. Your initial investment may be higher than your returned amount, resulting in a loss.
Other ways to calculate ROI
There are many ways to calculate ROI.
Say you resell your products or produce the items yourself. Your basic ROI calculations will look slightly different.
You must add up the Cost of Goods Sold (COGS). This includes things such as production costs, storage, shipping, and marketing.
Calculate these to come up with an accurate value for your total investment.
If you offer a product or service that directly impacts business operations - like marketing, training, equipment, or consumables - you'll want your ROI calculator to see how the benefits can improve your bottom line.
Program or project benefits can be in the form of cost savings or additional revenue.
Projecting ROI for an investment like a rental property is slightly more involved. Since most rental properties are financed, you need to add up all the out-of-pocket expenses like the:
downpayment
closing costs
remodeling
maintenance
This lets you see the total cost of the investment.
Profit or cash flow is calculated by subtracting your monthly mortgage payment from the property's rental income. Multiply it by 12 to get the total cash flow for the year.
Once you have the total investment and cash flow for the year, you can then calculate the actual ROI. If the rental property sits idle and vacant, the total cash flow for the year also goes down.
Annualized ROI
Financial advisors, banks, and other entities that offer investment vehicles can benefit from an annualized ROI calculator. This helps illustrate how much a long-term investment grows annually, accounting for the effect of compounding growth.
A simple formula for annualized ROI or annualized return looks like this:
In the formula above, n represents the number of years the investment is held. You can modify this equation quite easily to show monthly or daily returns.
Example:
Let's calculate the annualized return for an asset, such as real estate or stocks, that grew from $100,000 to $150,000 in 3 years.
After the calculation, we arrive at an annualized ROI of 14.47%. This means that for every year the asset was held, its value grew by an average of 14.47%.
Knowing this figure lets you extrapolate year-on-year growth over an extended period of time.
Taking the $50,000 profit and dividing it by 3 accounts only for growth regarding the original investment. This is easier to calculate but doesn't paint a complete picture of the asset's growth or annual return rate.
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