What's the difference between CAGR and IRR?

CAGR is the annualised growth between two single values — start and end. IRR (or XIRR for irregular dates) is the constant annual rate that makes the present value of every cash flow sum to zero. For a single buy and single sell with no intermediate cash flows, CAGR and IRR are mathematically identical. For everything else — recurring contributions, withdrawals, dividends — IRR is the correct metric and CAGR will mislead you.

Does this match Excel's XIRR function?

Yes, to four decimal places on standard cases. Our solver tries Newton-Raphson first (the algorithm Excel uses) and falls back to bisection when Newton diverges, so it's more robust on edge cases. If you see a difference larger than 0.01% versus Excel, it's usually because the cash flows have multiple sign changes — IRR is then mathematically ambiguous and both solvers may pick different valid roots.

What sign should I use for deposits vs withdrawals?

Negative for money going OUT of your pocket — deposits into the investment, buys, fees. Positive for money coming IN — withdrawals, sells, dividends, the final value if you're closing out. Don't forget the final flow: if you're still holding the position, use today's market value as a positive flow on today's date.

Why does IRR sometimes refuse to compute?

Three reasons: (1) all cash flows have the same sign — IRR needs at least one in and one out; (2) all flows are on the same date — IRR is undefined for a zero-duration series; (3) the cash flows have multiple sign changes and the IRR equation has multiple roots — mathematically ambiguous. In every case the calculator tells you which one happened and suggests a fix.

Can I drop a brokerage PDF directly?

Yes. Drop the PDF on the IRR panel and we run it through the same converter pipeline the rest of the site uses (free 7 pages a day, no signup). The opening balance is treated as a negative flow on period-start, the closing balance as a positive flow on period-end, and every dated transaction in between is sign-flipped into investor convention. You can edit any line in the textarea before computing.

Does CAGR account for volatility?

No. CAGR is computed from the start and end values only — drawdowns along the way are invisible to it. Two investments with identical CAGR can have radically different risk profiles. For pure return planning that's fine; for position sizing or risk management, also look at standard deviation of annual returns and maximum drawdown.

What's the difference between IRR and time-weighted return?

IRR is money-weighted: it rewards good timing of contributions and withdrawals. Time-weighted return strips out the effect of cash-flow timing and reports what a buy-and-hold investor would have earned. Brokerage statements sometimes show both. The IRR our calculator computes is money-weighted (XIRR), which is the right metric for the actual return you personally earned on the money you actually had invested when you had it invested.

How accurate is the money multiple?

Exact — it's just total positive ÷ total negative. Be wary of multiples without an IRR: 3× over 25 years is barely above inflation; 3× over 5 years is exceptional. The calculator shows both for that reason.

Is anything sent to your servers?

CAGR and IRR math run entirely in your browser — nothing about your cash flows leaves the page. PDF extraction does use our converter pipeline (same as the main product); the PDF transits encrypted to our EU servers in Frankfurt, is parsed, and is deleted within 24 hours by default. If you'd rather keep the PDF off our servers, type or paste the cash flows directly instead.

What is the best PDF bank statement converter?

The best converter depends on your accounting software. For QuickBooks, look for one that exports a native .qbo file (Web Connect format) — that skips column mapping entirely. For Xero, a tool that produces a Xero-template CSV with merged Money-In/Out columns will save the most time. StatementEdge handles both natively, plus Sage, Excel, CSV, and generic OFX, with automatic balance-chain reconciliation that flags any extraction error before you import.

How do I convert a PDF bank statement to QuickBooks?

The most reliable path is to convert the PDF directly into a QuickBooks Web Connect file (.qbo) instead of going through CSV. CSV import in QBO requires manual column mapping and breaks on UK/EU number formats. A .qbo file imports natively with no mapping. Upload your PDF to a converter that supports .qbo output (such as StatementEdge), download the .qbo, then in QBO go to Banking → Upload from file → File upload.

How do I convert a bank statement PDF to Excel?

Use a converter that respects your bank's locale (US, UK, EU, etc.) and emits an Excel file with ISO dates and signed amount columns. Generic OCR tools often misread comma decimals as thousands separators or split Money-In/Money-Out columns into two separate amount fields. Specialised converters like StatementEdge normalise these automatically before export.

Are PDF bank statement converters safe to use?

Safety depends on three things: where the file is processed, whether it's retained, and whether your data is used for AI training. StatementEdge processes files in the EU (Frankfurt), auto-deletes the source PDF within 1 hour by default, and uses AI providers with no-training settings enabled. Look for these guarantees on any converter you're considering — many tools store statements indefinitely and may be in jurisdictions without GDPR protection.

What's the difference between QBO, QFX, and OFX file formats?

All three are based on the Open Financial Exchange (OFX) SGML format from the late 1990s. .ofx is the generic format, accepted by GnuCash, MoneyDance, Beancount, and many open-source tools. .qfx is Quicken's flavour, identical to OFX 1.0.2 with Quicken-specific headers. .qbo is Intuit's QuickBooks Desktop and Online flavour, which adds an INTU.BID tag identifying the originating financial institution. For QuickBooks use .qbo; for Quicken use .qfx; for anything else use .ofx.

How do I convert scanned (image) bank statements?

Scanned PDFs don't have a text layer, so traditional CSV-export tools fail on them. You need a converter with vision capability — one that can read pixels, not just embedded text. StatementEdge detects scanned pages automatically and routes them through a vision model with the same balance-chain verification as digital PDFs, so you still get a reconciled output even from an image-only source.

Can I batch-convert multiple bank statements at once?

Yes. StatementEdge accepts multiple PDFs in a single drag-and-drop or file selection — each becomes its own conversion job and the results page shows per-file status with the reconciliation verdict for each. For programmatic batch processing, the REST API is available on every plan (free tier included) and exposes the same conversion endpoint.

Free tool

Investment return calculator — IRR, CAGR and scenario comparison

Three calculators in one. CAGR for single-buy-single-sell. IRR (XIRR) for any cash-flow series with irregular dates — deposits, withdrawals, dividends, the final sell. And a compare panel for stacking scenarios side by side. Drop a brokerage PDF and we extract the cash flows for you.

What are you calculating?

Starting value

Ending value

€

Time held (years)

Try:

Annualised return (CAGR)

10.25%/ year

Equivalent to 62.89% total over 5 yrs (1.63×).

Profit / loss

€6,289.00

Money multiple

1.63×

Doubling time

7.1 yrs

CAGR and IRR run entirely in your browser. PDF extraction uses the same converter pipeline the rest of the site does — free 7 pages a day, no signup.

Runs in your browser: No upload, no signup. Your file never leaves your device.
Free and unmetered: Use it as often as you need. No daily quota, no credit card.
EU-built, GDPR-first: Hosted in Frankfurt. Built by a small EU team that takes privacy seriously.

What this calculator does

Three modes, one engine. CAGR(compound annual growth rate) is the right answer when you bought once and sold once — the textbook example is “I bought €10,000 of an index fund in 2020 and it's worth €16,289 today, five years later — what return did I earn?”. IRR (internal rate of return, or XIRR for irregular dates) is the right answer when there's a series of cash flows — you added more money along the way, took some out, received dividends, and finally sold. Compare stacks two or more scenarios next to each other so you can see which one actually won on a like-for-like basis.

CAGR — the closed-form formula

CAGR = (Ending / Starting)^1/years − 1. That's it. €10,000 → €16,289 over 5 years gives (1.6289)^0.2 − 1 ≈ 10.25%. Every other single-period annualisation is a special case of this formula. Doubling time is the inverse: ln(2) / ln(1 + r) — at 7% per year, money doubles in roughly 10 years. The calculator shows this directly alongside the headline CAGR.

IRR — what it actually measures

IRR is the constant annual rate of return that would make the present value of every cash flow sum to zero. In plain English: it's the “effective yield” on the money you put in, taking into account the dates each chunk went in and came out. A €10,000 lump sum that grew to €13,310 in 3 years has an IRR of exactly 10% — but if you added another €5,000 at the 18-month mark and ended with €18,500, the IRR changes because the time-weighting changes too.

Real-world IRR is XIRR: the same idea, but with each cash flow discounted by exact years-from-the-first-flow rather than by “periods”. This is what Excel's XIRR()function does and what most brokerage statements quote when they report “personal rate of return”. Our solver matches Excel's output to four decimal places on textbook cases, and is more robust on pathological ones: Excel's Newton-Raphson starts at 0.1 and fails when cash flows have unusual shapes; we fall back to bisection over a wide bracket if Newton diverges.

Sign convention — the part people get wrong

Negative cash flows are money out of your pocket: deposits into the investment, buys, fees you paid. Positive cash flows are money in: withdrawals, sells, dividends, the final liquidation value. If you don't have a final “sell” — because you're still holding the position — put the current market value as the final positive flow on today's date. The IRR you get is “the return you'd have earned if you sold today”.

The most common mistake is forgetting that lastcash flow. Without it, the IRR solver sees a bunch of money going out and nothing coming back, and refuses to converge — it'll tell you so, but the fix is always “add the current value as a positive flow on today”.

CAGR vs IRR — when to use which

One-shot purchase, one-shot sale:CAGR. The two numbers are identical in this case, so CAGR's simpler.
Recurring contributions (DCA, payroll): IRR. CAGR will overstate your return because it assumes all the money was invested from day one.
Withdrawals (FIRE, drawdown): IRR. Same reason — the timing matters.
Comparing two different strategies: IRR if the cash flows differ, CAGR if they have identical schedules. The Compare panel handles the simple case directly; for IRR-vs-IRR, compute each separately and read off the numbers.
Real estate: always IRR — you put money in for the deposit, more for renovations, get rental income, eventually sell. CAGR ignores all the intermediate cash flows.

Money multiple (MOIC) vs IRR

Private equity reports both for a reason. The money multiple(also called MOIC or TVPI) is just total cash out ÷ total cash in. A 3× multiple sounds great, but a 3× over 25 years is only ~4.5% IRR — basically a government bond. A 3× over 5 years is ~24.6% IRR — top-decile. The calculator reports both so you can't fool yourself with a multiple that hides a glacial time horizon.

What about volatility?

CAGR and IRR are arithmeticon the endpoints — they don't see drawdowns along the way. Two investments with the same CAGR can have wildly different risk profiles: a bond ladder that returned 6% per year with no volatility looks identical to a stock that returned 6% per year after losing 45% in the middle. For most planning decisions, CAGR is the right metric (it's what your wallet actually feels at the end). For position sizing or sleep-at-night decisions, you also need to look at volatility (standard deviation of annual returns) and max drawdown — neither of which this calculator computes.

Reconciling against a brokerage statement

Most brokerages now quote a “personal rate of return” or “time-weighted return” on the monthly statement. They're using either XIRR or Modified-Dietz under the hood. Drop a brokerage PDF into the IRR panel — we'll extract every deposit, withdrawal, and the period-end value, then solve for IRR. The math the brokerage reports should match ours to within ~0.1% for a clean account; bigger gaps usually mean the brokerage is netting fees, dividends or FX adjustments into a single line you can't see line-by-line, or they're reporting time-weighted return rather than money-weighted (XIRR is money-weighted — it rewards good timing of contributions, which time-weighted return deliberately ignores).

If you need to compare investment-account performance to interest-bearing-savings, also see the interest rate calculator (single-shot compound) and the savings goal calculator (recurring deposits with a target). For multi-account performance attribution, drop the statements into our main converter and run each through the IRR panel separately.

Worked example: VC fund vs index fund

Imagine a venture fund that took €100,000 in 2018, returned €50,000 in 2022 and €350,000 in 2026. Total in: €100k. Total out: €400k. Money multiple: 4×. That looks spectacular until you compute the IRR: roughly 18.5% / year over 8 years. Now compare against the index-fund counterfactual — the same €100k in 2018 into an S&P 500 tracker grew to ~€220k by 2026 (~10% / year). The fund did beat the index, but not by 4× — by 4× / 2.2× ≈ 1.8× cumulative, or about 8.5 percentage points per year. That's the calculation people screw up because they compare 4× to 2.2× instead of 18.5% to 10%.

FAQ

What's the difference between CAGR and IRR?: CAGR is the annualised growth between two single values — start and end. IRR (or XIRR for irregular dates) is the constant annual rate that makes the present value of every cash flow sum to zero. For a single buy and single sell with no intermediate cash flows, CAGR and IRR are mathematically identical. For everything else — recurring contributions, withdrawals, dividends — IRR is the correct metric and CAGR will mislead you.
Does this match Excel's XIRR function?: Yes, to four decimal places on standard cases. Our solver tries Newton-Raphson first (the algorithm Excel uses) and falls back to bisection when Newton diverges, so it's more robust on edge cases. If you see a difference larger than 0.01% versus Excel, it's usually because the cash flows have multiple sign changes — IRR is then mathematically ambiguous and both solvers may pick different valid roots.
What sign should I use for deposits vs withdrawals?: Negative for money going OUT of your pocket — deposits into the investment, buys, fees. Positive for money coming IN — withdrawals, sells, dividends, the final value if you're closing out. Don't forget the final flow: if you're still holding the position, use today's market value as a positive flow on today's date.
Why does IRR sometimes refuse to compute?: Three reasons: (1) all cash flows have the same sign — IRR needs at least one in and one out; (2) all flows are on the same date — IRR is undefined for a zero-duration series; (3) the cash flows have multiple sign changes and the IRR equation has multiple roots — mathematically ambiguous. In every case the calculator tells you which one happened and suggests a fix.
Can I drop a brokerage PDF directly?: Yes. Drop the PDF on the IRR panel and we run it through the same converter pipeline the rest of the site uses (free 7 pages a day, no signup). The opening balance is treated as a negative flow on period-start, the closing balance as a positive flow on period-end, and every dated transaction in between is sign-flipped into investor convention. You can edit any line in the textarea before computing.
Does CAGR account for volatility?: No. CAGR is computed from the start and end values only — drawdowns along the way are invisible to it. Two investments with identical CAGR can have radically different risk profiles. For pure return planning that's fine; for position sizing or risk management, also look at standard deviation of annual returns and maximum drawdown.
What's the difference between IRR and time-weighted return?: IRR is money-weighted: it rewards good timing of contributions and withdrawals. Time-weighted return strips out the effect of cash-flow timing and reports what a buy-and-hold investor would have earned. Brokerage statements sometimes show both. The IRR our calculator computes is money-weighted (XIRR), which is the right metric for the actual return you personally earned on the money you actually had invested when you had it invested.
How accurate is the money multiple?: Exact — it's just total positive ÷ total negative. Be wary of multiples without an IRR: 3× over 25 years is barely above inflation; 3× over 5 years is exceptional. The calculator shows both for that reason.
Is anything sent to your servers?: CAGR and IRR math run entirely in your browser — nothing about your cash flows leaves the page. PDF extraction does use our converter pipeline (same as the main product); the PDF transits encrypted to our EU servers in Frankfurt, is parsed, and is deleted within 24 hours by default. If you'd rather keep the PDF off our servers, type or paste the cash flows directly instead.