It is useful to understand the term and be able to calculate a Payback period as is conceptually simple to understand and quite easy to calculate. There are many, however, who view it as a seriously flawed and over simplistic way of appraising investments.
Simply put the payback period is the time taken to recover the initial investment. So a £100,000 investment making a profit of £20,000 a year has a payback period of 5 years. Clearly investments with a shorter payback period are preferable to a long period. Companies using payback period as a investment tool will have a maximum acceptable period. Your full or part time finance director can advise you on investment appraisal methods.
Some of the serious flaws referred :
It ignores cash flows after the payback period.
It makes no allowance for risk.
It is not directly related to wealth maximisation (unlike Net Present Value).
It ignores the “time value of money”.
It is possible to compensate for some of these flaws, for example, the cash flow can be discounted for inflation and by using the WACC and then calculating the payback period but this only really compensates for the time value of money and not address the other deficiencies like cash flows after the end of the payback period which may be significant. It is easy to imagine a scenario where 2 projects produce only slightly different paybacks of say 2 year and 2.1 years but where the former stops producing cash flows after say 3 years whereas the latter continues to produce income for say 10 years.
A strong pro for the use of the payback period is that it is conservative, valuing only short term returns which can be forecasted with more certainty than longer term returns. However this argument, whilst having some merit is not that strong – the NPV also adjusts for the uncertainty of future cash flows and does so more correctly.