How to Calculate Annual Growth Rate in Excel

Last Updated: March 29, 2019 Tested

It's impossible to run a business without relevant and accurate metrics. Going without them is like steering a ship with no radar in zero visibility. Although you can spend hundreds -- even thousands -- of dollars on professionally designed bookkeeping and business planning software, you can get the same information by setting up Microsoft Excel or a similar spreadsheet program. This process is well within the reach of even beginners at computer operations, and should take less than 1 hour once you've gathered your data.

Steps

1
Gather the data relevant to the growth you want to calculate. You might want to calculate overall growth of an investment, growth of a certain expense base, growth of sales or any other facet of your business or personal investments.
- You will need information for at least 2 complete and consecutive years if you want to calculate meaningfully comparable annual growth rates.
- If calculating the annual growth of gross income for a business, you would need all the income for all departments of your business, for example sales receipts or bank statements showing all deposits.
2
Total all the relevant numbers for the area on which you want to run this calculation. Calculate each year separately.
- For example, calculating sales growth in a department will mean totaling all sales numbers for that department for each year, but not sales numbers for other departments or expense numbers.
- For robust analysis of your business performance, you will want to do this for gross income, gross profit, net profit and meaningful statistics from each location and/or department.
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3
Enter the earliest year for which you have numbers in line 2, column A of your Excel spreadsheet. Enter the next year in line 3, column A.
4
Enter departments and areas in column B, C, D, etc. of line 1. If you're only doing 1 comparison, you only need 1 column.
5
Enter the appropriate totals from earlier steps in the appropriate cells. For example, if you had 2007 in line 2, 2008 in line 3, sales in column A and net profit in column B. The total sales for 2008 would go in cell 3A and the net profit for 2007 would go in cell 2B.
6
Enter the following formula in line 4, column B: "(+B3/B2*100)-100". This will instruct Microsoft Excel to enter the difference between performance for the 2 years, expressing as percentage growth.
7
Copy and paste the contents of cell B4 to other cells where you need the annual growth rate. Excel will automatically change the formula to reflect the new location.