What are the four alternative methods for evaluating capital budgeting projects? What is an ...

The four methods are: 1. Net Present Value (NPV); 2. Internal Rate of Return (IRR); 3. Payback; and 4. Accrual Accounting Rate of Return (AARR). NPV has advantages in that it uses discounted cash flows, and can deal with uneven cash flows, considers the inflows and outflows of the project. A disadvantage of NPV is that the results indicate if it achieves a particular cost of capital or not, but it does not indicate what the rate of return actually is. The IRR method generates an expected rate of return for the investment given the time of the project and the discounting of cash flows. A disadvantage of the IRR is that the results are expressed in the form of a percentage rather than in dollars and it is difficult to use when the project has uneven cash flows. The payback is simple to use, and adapts to both even and uneven cash flows. It also highlights the liquidity of a project. A disadvantage to the payback is that it does not consider either the time value of money, or the cash flows that occur after the payback time period. The AARR method uses the information that is most often found in financial statements –including net income and depreciation. A drawback is that the method does not take into account the time value of money or the cash