MODELING ACCURATE INTEREST IN CASH FLOWS OF CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS TOWARD IMPROVED FORECASTING OF COST OF CAPITAL

Construction contactors must continuously seek to improve their cash flows, which reside at the heart of their financial success. They require careful planning, analysis, and optimization to avoid the risk of bankruptcy, remain profitable, and secure long-term growth. Sources of cash include bank loans and retained earnings, which are conceptually similar in that they both incur a cost of capital. Financial management therefore requires accurate yet customizable modeling capabilities that can quantify all expenses, including said cost of capital. However, currently existing cash flow models in construction engineering and management have strongly simplified the manner in which interest is assessed, which may even lead to overstating it at a disadvantage to contractors. The variable nature of cash balances, especially in the early phases of construction projects, contribute to this challenging issue. This research therefore extends a new cash flow model with an accurate interest calculation. It utilizes singularity functions, so called because of their ability to flexibly model changes across any number of different ranges. The interest function is continuous for activity costs of any duration and allows the realistic case that activities may begin between integer time periods, which are often calendar months. Such fractional interest calculation has hitherto been lacking from the literature. It also provides insights into the self-referential behavior of compound interest for variable cash balances. The contribution of this study is twofold; augmenting the corpus of financial analysis theory with a new interest formula, whose strengths include its generic nature and that it can be evaluated at any fractional value of time, and providing construction managers with a tool to help improve and fine-tune the financial performance of their projects.