The minimum lease payments are the lowest amount that a lessee can expect to make over the lifetime of the lease. The minimum lease payments, including a guarantee of a residual if applicable, are used to value the lease by doing a net present value (NPV) calculation. The method of calculating minimum lease payments is laid out in the Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 13 (FAS 13), Accounting for Leases.

When I first joined TimeValue Software, it took me a while to understand the difference between Daily (compounding) and Exact Days. Both methods calculate interest each day but that is where the similarity ends.

Occasionally, we get a customer that has a unique situation where they have to do daily payments. Sometimes they are only during the business week and sometimes they are 7 days a week.  This is a calculation that you can do in TValue but it takes a little bit of creativity to do it.

If you are interested in manually calculating an interest amount with irregular payments, you need to understand the impact of a stub period in the calculation.  Sometimes the calculations are easy to verify and sometimes you may get a hybrid calculation because you have to do two calculations to verify the interest amount.

TValue software is an excellent tool to calculate the discount or premium amortization of a bond. The Internal Revenue Service requires you to use the “constant yield method” to amortize bond premiums or discounts, which is the excess or discount of the bond price over face value. You pay the bond price and, if you hold the bond until maturity, you receive the face value. This creates a loss or gain, but you can’t deduct the loss or gain all at once. Instead, you amortize the bond over its remaining lifetime to expense part of the loss or book income each year. The amortized amount reduces or increases the interest income you receive for investing in the bond.