Returns Calculator (XIRR)

XIRR — the extended internal rate of return — is the one annualised figure that ties together cash flows made on different dates. The calculator builds the full list of your dated cash flows, marks every investment as money leaving you and your current value as money coming back, and then solves for the single rate that makes their net present value zero. There is no closed-form answer, so it iterates using the same Newton-Raphson method Excel's XIRR uses, which is why the result reconciles with your CAMS or KFintech statement rather than contradicting it.

This matters because the number most SIP investors quote themselves is wrong. Put in ₹3.6 lakh over three years, watch it grow to ₹4.2 lakh, and it feels like a 16.7% return. It is not, because that arithmetic ignores when each instalment went in — the first worked for thirty-six months, the last for barely one. Weighted properly by time, the honest annualised figure is closer to 10%. Absolute return flatters you; XIRR tells the truth.

Three kinds of cash flow are modelled together, and most tools handle only the first. Regular SIP instalments run from your SIP entry date through the end of the investment period, rising once every twelve months if you set an annual step-up. Lump-sum top-ups can be added on any date — a Diwali bonus, a maturity reinvested — and are treated as one-off investments. Withdrawals are the same table with the sign reversed: money you took out, entered as a positive flow on its date, so a partial redemption is handled correctly rather than quietly ignored.

The valuation date is independent of everything else. Your SIP might have ended two years ago while the corpus kept compounding, or you might be checking the figure as of today — either way you enter the valuation date directly, and the calculator values the portfolio at that point. This separation is the part cheaper tools get wrong: they assume the SIP end and the valuation are the same day, which forces you to misstate one of them.

Net profit is measured honestly. It is your final portfolio value plus everything you have already withdrawn, minus everything you put in — so money taken out along the way still counts as a gain rather than vanishing from the total. Alongside the headline XIRR, the calculator shows the real, inflation-adjusted XIRR: enter an assumed inflation rate and it applies the Fisher relation, (1 + XIRR) / (1 + inflation) - 1, to show what your return is really worth in purchasing power. A 15% nominal XIRR at 6% inflation is a little under 9% in real terms, and that gap is the number that actually decides whether your corpus keeps pace with the cost of living.

Every dated flow the calculation reads is listed on a separate cash-flow view, so you can audit the figure line by line rather than trust a black box. If you enter your transactions exactly, the XIRR here should match the one on your consolidated account statement to the decimal. Day counting is actual/365 as in Excel, and a near-total loss — a final value at 2% or less of everything invested — reports plainly as a full loss rather than a spuriously precise number.