Business Investment Decision Analysis
Get cash-flow models, NPV, downside tests, and a funding-aware recommendation for business investments and competing uses of capital.
Before & after
Same prompt, same agent — the only difference is the skill.
That's a classic build-versus-buy decision. The answer really depends on several factors—your team's capacity, the vendor's pricing, the timeline you're working with, and how well the off-the-shelf solution fits your needs. You'd want to weigh the upfront software cost against the engineering time and ongoing maintenance costs of building it yourself. Some questions to consider: How much engineering time would building take? What's the annual license cost? How critical is this to your roadmap? Once you think through those, we could sketch out a rough comparison.
BUILD VS. BUY DECISION MATRIX BUY (License Route) • Cost: 45K/year, 1-month setup • Time to launch: 6 weeks (vendor implementation + your integration) • Customization: 20% limited to their config UI • Maintenance: Vendor owns updates and security • Vendor risk: Single dependency; replacement cost if they sunset the product BUILD (In-House Route) • Engineering cost: 2 engineers x 12 weeks = ~200K burn + equipment • Time to launch: 14 weeks (dev + testing) • Customization: 100% flexibility • Maintenance: Your team owns bugs, upgrades, security patches indefinitely • Technical debt: Ongoing maintenance cost ~0.5 FTE/year RECOMMENDATION Buy the license unless: (1) Your roadmap has 3+ years of heavy customization needs, or (2) this is core IP that competitors cannot access. Total 3-year cost of build = 620K (engineering + maintenance). Buy = 135K. The buy path wins on budget and speed; reserve engineering for your differentiated features.
About this skill
“The equipment pays for itself” can hide maintenance, working capital, or savings that never become cash. This skill turns an equipment purchase, hire, software project, property investment, or new business proposal into comparable cash flows, downside tests, and a clear investment decision.
What it does
- Separates real cash savings from accounting benefits, unused capacity, and optimistic revenue forecasts.
- Calculates NPV, payback, and appropriate supplementary metrics with explicit timing and assumptions.
- Compares build versus buy, lease versus buy, and vendor proposals on equivalent service and ownership costs.
- Finds break-even savings, utilization, selling price, or purchase price that would change the decision.
- Tests downside economics and peak funding needs separately, including delays and working capital.
- Evaluates feasible combinations of projects under a capital constraint instead of blindly ranking return percentages.
What you get
A decision brief with period-by-period cash flows, investment metrics, downside results, and a recommendation tied to specific approval conditions. For a quick calculation, you get the calculation and the assumptions that matter without a full report.
Best for
Business owners, operators, finance teams, and founders deciding whether to commit money to assets, people, technology, vendors, or business expansion.
SKILL.md preview
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name: business-investment-decision-analysis
description: Evaluates business investments by building incremental cash flows, comparing NPV on consistent terms, stress-testing liquidity, and selecting feasible uses of limited capital. Use when the user says "should we buy this equipment", "is this hire worth it", "calculate the ROI", "lease or buy", "build it or buy it", "which project should we fund", "the ROI looks good but we keep running out of cash", or "check this investment proposal".
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# Business Investment Decision Analysis
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