Niek, Joeu and Bruno,

My sincerest thanks for your very timely, helpful and spirited replies! I
think I now have a pretty good handle on why I was getting so many varying
results which could not be reconciled with "the experts" results at the
accounting firm. Joeu's suggestion that perhaps they were compounding
quarterly most likely looks like what they in fact did since doing so equals
their results precisely. I may have been led astray by the fact that there
is nothing I can find in the contract documents that would have suggested
quarterly compounding.

Gentlemen, again, my sincerest thanks. I am very much in your collective
debt.

Pete



" wrote
in message ...
"Bruno Campanini" wrote:
"PJF" wrote:
The result I got was: $3,869,699.64
[....]
Their calculation is definetely WRONG!!! Mathematically:
4 725 000 / ((1 + 0.105)^2) = 3 869 990.64

I don't know how you got 3,869,990.64. Probably just a
recording error. But both Excel and an HP11C calculator
compute 4725000/(1.105^2) = 3869699.64, which also
matches the PV() function result for annual compouning.
(No surprise.)