Return on cash Systems, Transfer Pricing and Divisional Performance

27/02/2021 0 By indiafreenotes

Return on cash Systems

Cash on cash return is a rate of return ratio that calculates the total cash earned on the total cash invested. The amount of the total cash earned is generally based on the annual pre-tax cash flow.

A cash-on-cash return is a rate of return often used in real estate transactions that calculates the cash income earned on the cash invested in a property. Put simply, cash-on-cash return measures the annual return the investor made on the property in relation to the amount of mortgage paid during the same year. It is considered relatively easy to understand and one of the most important real estate ROI calculations.

Cash on cash return is a simple financial metric that allows the assessment of cash flows from a company’s income-generating assets. The ratio is primarily used in commercial real estate transactions. In the real estate industry, the cash-on-cash return is sometimes referred to as the cash yield on a property investment.

The Formula for Cash-on-Cash Return

Cash on Cash Return = Annual Pre-Tax Cash Flow / Total Cash Invested

Annual Pre-Tax Cash Flow​where:

APTCF = (GSR + OI) – (V + OE + AMP)

GSR = Gross scheduled rent

OI = Other incomeV = Vacancy

OE = Operating expenses

AMP = Annual mortgage payments​

A cash-on-cash return is a metric normally used to measure commercial real estate investment performance. It is sometimes referred to as the cash yield on a property investment. The cash-on-cash return rate provides business owners and investors with an analysis of the business plan for a property and the potential cash distributions over the life of the investment.

Cash-on-cash return analysis is often used for investment properties that involve long-term debt borrowing. When debt is included in a real estate transaction, as is the case with most commercial properties, the actual cash return on the investment differs from the standard return on investment (ROI).

Calculations based on standard ROI take into account the total return on an investment. Cash-on-cash return, on the other hand, only measures the return on the actual cash invested, providing a more accurate analysis of the investment’s performance.

Transfer Pricing

Transfer price is the price at which related parties transact with each other, such as during the trade of supplies or labor between departments. Transfer prices are used when individual entities of a larger multi-entity firm are treated and measured as separately run entities. It is common for multi-entity corporations to be consolidated on a financial reporting basis; however, they may report each entity separately for tax purposes.

In taxation and accounting, transfer pricing refers to the rules and methods for pricing transactions within and between enterprises under common ownership or control. Because of the potential for cross-border controlled transactions to distort taxable income, tax authorities in many countries can adjust intragroup transfer prices that differ from what would have been charged by unrelated enterprises dealing at arm’s length (the arm’s-length principle). The OECD and World Bank recommend intragroup pricing rules based on the arm’s-length principle, and 19 of the 20 members of the G20 have adopted similar measures through bilateral treaties and domestic legislation, regulations, or administrative practice. Countries with transfer pricing legislation generally follow the OECD Transfer Pricing Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and Tax Administrations in most respects, although their rules can differ on some important details.

Where adopted, transfer pricing rules allow tax authorities to adjust prices for most cross-border intragroup transactions, including transfers of tangible or intangible property, services, and loans. For example, a tax authority may increase a company’s taxable income by reducing the price of goods purchased from an affiliated foreign manufacturer or raising the royalty the company must charge its foreign subsidiaries for rights to use a proprietary technology or brand name. These adjustments are generally calculated using one or more of the transfer pricing methods specified in the OECD guidelines and are subject to judicial review or other dispute resolution mechanisms.

Although transfer pricing is sometimes inaccurately presented by commentators as a tax avoidance practice or technique (transfer mispricing), the term refers to a set of substantive and administrative regulatory requirements imposed by governments on certain taxpayers. However, aggressive intragroup pricing especially for debt and intangibles has played a major role in corporate tax avoidance, and it was one of the issues identified when the OECD released its base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) action plan in 2013. The OECD’s 2015 final BEPS reports called for country-by-country reporting and stricter rules for transfers of risk and intangibles but recommended continued adherence to the arm’s-length principle. These recommendations have been criticized by many taxpayers and professional service firms for departing from established principles and by some academics and advocacy groups for failing to make adequate changes.

Transfer pricing should not be conflated with fraudulent trade mis-invoicing, which is a technique for concealing illicit transfers by reporting falsified prices on invoices submitted to customs officials. “Because they often both involve mispricing, many aggressive tax avoidance schemes by multinational corporations can easily be confused with trade misinvoicing. However, they should be regarded as separate policy problems with separate solutions,” according to Global Financial Integrity, a non-profit research and advocacy group focused on countering illicit financial flows.

Risks:

  1. There can be a disagreement among the organizational division managers as what the policies should be regarding the transfer policies.
  2. There are a lot of additional costs that are linked with the required time and manpower which is required to execute transfer pricing and help in designing the accounting system.
  3. It gets difficult to estimate the right amount of pricing policy for intangibles such as services, as transfer pricing does not work well as these departments do not provide measurable benefits.
  4. The issue of transfer pricing may give rise to dysfunctional behavior among managers of organizational units. Another matter of concern is the process of transfer pricing is highly complicated and time-consuming in large multi-nationals.
  5. Buyer and seller perform different functions from each other that undertakes different types of risks. For instance, the seller may or may not provide the warranty for the product. But the price a buyer would pay would be affected by the difference. The risks that impact prices are as follows
  • Financial & currency risk
  • Collection risk
  • Market and entrepreneurial risk
  • Product obsolescence risk
  • Credit risk

Benefits:

  1. Transfer pricing helps in reducing the duty costs by shipping goods into high tariff countries at minimal transfer prices so that duty base associated with these transactions are low.
  2. Reducing income taxes in high tax countries by overpricing goods that are transferred to units in those countries where the tax rate is comparatively lower thereby giving them a higher profit margin.

Divisional Performance

  1. The Economic Value Added (EVA)

ROI and RI cannot stand alone as a financial measure of divisional performance. One of the factors contribute to a company’s long-run objectives is short-run profit ability. ROI and RI are short-run concepts that deal only with the current reporting period whereas managerial performance measures should focus on future results that can be expected because of present actions.

RI has been refined and re-named as economic value added (EVA) by the Stern Stewart & Co. EVA is a financial performance measure based on operating income after taxes, the investment in assets required to generate that income and the cost of the investment in assets (or, weighted average cost of capital). The objective of EVA is to develop a performance measure that find the ways in which company value can be added or lost. The EVA concept extends the traditional residual income measure by incorporating adjustments to the divisional financial performance measure for distortions introduced by GAAP. Thus, by linking divisional performance to EVA, managers are motivated to focus on increasing shareholder value.

  1. The Residual Income (RI)

Residual income overcomes the dysfunctional aspect of ROI. It is because the use of ROI as a performance measurement can lead to under-investment. For example, a manager currently achieving a high rate of return (say 30 percent) may not wish to pursue a project yielding a lower rate of return (say 20 percent) even though such as a project may be desirable to a company which can raise capital at an even lower rate. Thus, used RI is better than ROI.

The purpose of evaluating the performance of divisional managers, RI is defined as controllable contribution less a cost of capital charge on the investment controllable by the divisional manager. For evaluating the economic performance of the division RI can be defined as divisional contribution less a cost of capital charge on the total investment in assets employed by the division.

Besides, RI is favour than ROI and it more flexible because different cost of capital percentage rates can be applied to investments that have different levels of risk. There is not only will the cost of capital of divisions that have different levels of risk differ so may the risk and cost of capital of assets within the same division. The RI measure enables to calculate the different risk-adjusted in capital cost while ROI cannot incorporate these differences.

While ROI is a ratio, RI is an absolute figure. RI deals with the problems of ROI adequately because any investment, which will earn higher than the capital charge will improve the RI. Therefore, use of RI motivates divisional managers to acquire only those assets, which will improve the performance of the company as a whole. Thus, the RI method sets the same profit objective for same assets in different divisions.

A sophisticated system also solves the problem of the same profit objective for different assets in the same division by using different rate of capital charges for different class of assets. RI is definitely a superior measure compared to ROI for measuring divisional performance.

  1. The Return on Investment (ROI)

Nowadays, most of companies concentrate on the return on investment (ROI) of a division that is profit as a percentage in direct relation to investment of division which instead of focusing on the size of a division’s profits. ROI addressed divisional profit as a percentage of the assets employed in the division. Assets employed can be defined as total divisional assets, assets controllable by the divisional manager, or net assets.

The main advantage of using ROI is provides a valuable information about the overall approximation on the success of a firm’s past investment policy by providing a abstract of the ex post return on capital invested. According to Kaplan and Atkinson, they state that however, lack of some form of measurement of the ex post returns on capital, there is still useful for accurate estimates of future cash flows during the capital budgeting process. When ROI is used as a managerial performance measure, Measuring returns on invested capital also focuses managers’ attention on the impact of levels of working capital (in particular, stocks and debtors) on the ROI. It can lead to decisions making that are optimal for individual divisions but sub-optimal for the company. ROI focuses on short-term profitability, looking only at the last quarter or last year for performance evaluation. This time horizon may not be long enough for many projects to be evaluated.

(a) It is a comprehensive measure and captures all the factors which influence figures in financial statements.

(b) It is easy to calculate and understand.

(c) It makes comparison of performances of different divisions easy.

(d) Data on ROI of different companies are easily available and that helps in inter-firm comparison.