Have you ever thought you could use more money? My guess is, “yes”.

Renting out a property is a good way to make some passive income.

I'm not here to give you investment advice though.

What I have for you, is how you can answer "is it a good investment?"

Today in Between the Sheets we talk finance, as well as:

• More updates to Excel for the web
• Validation in MS Forms
• Custom Teams notification settings

🏠 Rental Property ROI Calculator - download our template

Before you make any investment decisions, you need to crunch some numbers.

With our ready-to-use template, you can easily calculate the cash-on-cash return and the return on investment (ROI).

Plug in the details of your investment, and Excel will do the rest.

But to make a truly informed decision, you should understand what's being calculated, and how.

• Property Purchase Costs: the initial investment, including taxes & fees, realtor fees, rehab and closing costs.
• Monthly Debt Service: Use the PMT function in Excel to calculate the monthly mortgage payment.
• Monthly Revenue: Estimate the monthly rental income from the property.
• Monthly Expenses: property management fees, maintenance, insurance, and taxes.

• Monthly Cash Flow: Take total monthly revenue and subtract debt service and expenses.
• Annual Cash Flow: Multiply monthly cash flow by 12 for yearly cash flow.
• Cash-On-Cash Return: Divide the annual cash flow by (your own) cash invested.

To see how profitable your property truly is, we need to ignore the principal repayment since it's not an expense. Here’s how you can do it:

• Find Principal Payment: Use the CUMPRINC function to check how much principal you pay each month.
• Calculate Interest: Subtract the principal payment from your total mortgage payment to find the interest amount.

Now, let’s work out your real rate of return:

• Yearly Cash Flow: Add up your yearly cash flow without including the principal payment.
• Rate of Return: Divide this cash flow by the total equity you invested.

This way, you’ll get a clear picture of how well your investment is doing.

You'll find a detailed walkthrough in the blog post.

💰 Boost Your Confidence in Finance (Fast)

Are you looking to brush up on finance basics and make sense of confusing terms?

Stay on top of your investments?

Take my FREE QuickStart to Financial Analysis course. You'll learn essential accounting concepts in just 30 minutes.

This QuickStart is part of our Fundamentals of Financial Analysis course, where we go in-depth into all things finance.

If you haven't taken the full course, and want to understand and be able to explain financial data sign up now to the QuickStart.

🤓 Geeky News

🕸️ More grid improvements in Excel for the Web

Last time, Microsoft announced improvements around resizing, moving and freezing rows and columns. But they're not done with modernizing the Excel Web experience. The latest update includes:

• Hyperlink preview - hover over a link to see where it will take you. You can also copy, edit, or remove the link from there.
• Zoom dropdown in the status bar - quickly select a predefined zoom value or type in your own.
• Renaming sheets by typing over the tabs.
• The ability to open local files in your browser.

📝 Validate open-text responses in Microsoft Forms

​Microsoft Forms added restrictions that you can apply to open text questions. This ensures you collect more accurate responses.

Say, you're collecting email addresses from your customers or job applicants. You can now validate that the input is formatted as a proper email address. If the responders enter an incorrect format, they won't be able to submit the form.

You can control the character limit for free-text responses. Or you can require specific words are used. You also have validations for numbers and URLs.

👥 Customize Teams notifications

If you're tired of the default Teams ping (did you just hear it in your head?), you can now change the sound of notifications.

Click on the 3 dots (...) in the top right (next to your profile picture) to open Settings.

There, go to Notifications and activity > Sounds.

You can also choose a different sound for urgent and priority contact notifications. That way, you can easily differentiate them from the general pings.

BTW, it's also a good idea to turn off sounds when your status is busy or in a meeting. That way you won't be distracted by colleagues who can't take a hint. 😉

Another way to cut down on distracting notifications is to turn them off for channel posts.

You can have notifications for the channel on but deem a specific post not relevant. If you click on the three-dot menu (...) at the top right of the post, you can turn off the notifications. You won't see any updates about future messages in this thread.

And if you have channel notifications off but a specific post caught your interest? Turn on notifications for that post only to stay involved in the discussion.

👏 Power Stories

The students who completed Fundamentals of Financial Analysis had this to say:

I bought this course while pursuing an MBA. I found the Master's to be heavily theoretical and lacking in practical skills. This course bridged that gap perfectly. It allowed me to apply the concepts I was learning in my Master's program, solidifying my understanding and building confidence in these areas. The course also provided a valuable opportunity to enhance my Excel skills. Now I can set up simple Excel journal entries for a small business and get the financial statements from it to analyse the performance.

Lorenzo Ceccarelli, Mechanical Engineer

I took the class primarily to refresh my Excel knowledge, close gaps in my knowledge, such as in ADExLER, and learn some new functions. I feel I'm better and more confident, but also, as Albert Einstein described: "The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.” I have been running courses on other topics myself. Therefore, I appreciate the high quality of Leila's courses and see the effort that went into the production.

Dr. Heike Franz, Solopreneur, Consultant

I'm especially glad how practical our members find our courses to be. 🙏

Confidence-boosting is another term I love seeing in our reviews. So if your financial confidence needs a boost, check out the Quick Start to Financial Analysis.

See you next week,

Leila

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