FV Function

If you are in finance, then I am sure that Microsoft Excel is your best tool to efficiently analyze and manage the financial decisions. In any software/program related to Finance, the tool must be very flexible and easy to navigate, your data may change depending upon the outcome, so is Excel.

Microsoft Excel is very handy in this matter, moreover Excel provides some built-in functions for the finance person to ease their calculations.

In this article and in the upcoming few articles, I will discuss with you about financial functions in Excel.

You can always use these financial functions nested with the other functions in Excel.

Today I will discuss about FV Function in Microsoft Excel.

How to calculate the future value of an investment ?

What is FV function in Excel ?

FV is the abbreviated form of Future Value, if you need to calculate the future value on investment periodic deposits or loans etc., you will need to use FV function. Let’s take an example to understand ‘What is FV or Future Function ?’.

Suppose you want to invest in a Bank which offers you 8% interest per annum. You plan to invest $300 per quarter and you want to run this scheme for 2 years, then obviously, you will be interested to know what will be the future value of your deposits.

So let’s discuss this function in details.

Description

The Microsoft Excel FV function returns the future value of an investment based on an interest rate and a constant payment schedule.

Syntax

The syntax for the FV function in Microsoft Excel is very simple,

=FV(rate, nper, pmt, [PV], [Type])

Parameters or Arguments

interest_rate

The interest rate for the investment.

number_payments

The number of payments for the annuity.

payment

The amount of the payment made each period.

PV

Optional. It is the present value of the payments. If this parameter is omitted, it assumes PV to be 0.

Type

It is optional. It indicates when the payments are due. If the Type parameter is omitted, it assumes a Type value of 0. Type can be one of the following values:

Value Explanation

0 à Payments are due at the end of the period. (it is default)

1 à Payments are due at the beginning of the period.

Example :

How to use the FV Function in Excel ?

If we take the above example the Future Value formula will be as under.

=FV(C2/C4, (C4*C3), -C5, -C6)

“Suppose you want to invest in a Bank which offers you 8% interest per annum. You plan to invest $300 per month (Present Value : $7200) and you want to run this scheme for 2 years, then obviously, you will be interested to know what will be the future value of your deposits.”

FV Function (Future Value Formula) in Excel

Here one question may arise in your mind.

Why put a negative sign in front of Payment and Present Value ?

=FV(C2/C4, (C4*C3), -C5, -C6)

This is because, if the ‘payment’ argument is for cash going out of business, the payment value will be negative and for cash received, it must be positive.

Note : Make sure use the units of rate and ‘nper’ are consistent. If we make quarterly payments on a 2-year loan at an annual interest of 8%, we need to use ‘8%/4’ for rate and 2*4 for ‘nper’.

If we make quarterly payments on the same loan or investment, then we would use 8%/4 for rate and 4*2 for ‘nper’.

If you still have some questions, feel free to ask in the comment box.

I hope you have enjoyed this article to understand how to use FV function in Excel. Take care…

Thank you for reading….