There is a mathmatical formula which you can use to get the .33 recurring or to put this figure into months or days.
.33 would be 33% of the way into year 4
Calculate the payback period:
Table 1. Project 1 income streams
Cost of Project 1: £60,000
yr1 10,000
yr2 20,000
yr3 20,000
yr4 30,000
yr5 30,000
First we add up year 1, year 2, and year 3, this will give us 50,000
Now we need another 10,000 to make up to the 60,000 initial capital
Using this math formula will make it easy when working with ANY figures:
We want 10,000 from year 4 which contains a total of 30,000
So we simply divide 10,000 by 30,000 to give us 0.333333333
Now all you do to this 0.3333333 is either multiply it by 12 to get the answer in months: which is exactly 4
Or you can multiply the 0.333333 by 365 to get the answer in days: which is 121.66666 days
Therefore, the overall payback period is 3 years and 4 months
This method works with ANY hypothetical figures