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Calculating your finances - Timeslips Corp.'s PercentEdge mortgage program - evaluation

Home Office Computing, June, 1991 by Lisa Kleinholz

AT A GLANCE: Calculates mortgage schedules including balloon payments, savings accumulations with variable rates over time, present values, complex structured loans, legal settlements. Transfers values to spreadsheet or word-processor files. Memory-resident or stand-alone. Pop-up calculator and calendar paste figures directly into cells.

DOCUMENTATION: Thorough manual explains four basic calculation screens well, even for those who have only moderate understanding of interest and loan payment calculations.

ERROR HANDLING: I never lost data, but occasionally program jumped into a calculation before I was ready and there was no way to cancel.

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EASE OF USE: Navigation pretty intuitive, with good on-line help. However, financial concepts might be a bit rough for novices.

SUPPORT: Not toll-free. First 30 days free from first phone call. After that you pay $60 per hour, $10 minimum per call, or $50 per year for PercentEdge only; $100 per year covers support for all Timeslips products. Yearly plan includes use of toll-free number.

VERSION REVIEWED: 1.0

LIST PRICE: $100

STREET PRICE RANGE: $60 to $100

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: 320K IBM compatible; two drives (hard-disk drive recommended); monochrome, CGA, EGA, VGA, Hercules; DOS 2.1 or higher; 5.25- and 3.5-inch

PUBLISHER: Timeslips Corp., 239 Western Ave., Essex, MA 01929; (508) 768-6100

You've had your eye on a 33-MHz 486 with super VGA and a 200MB hard-disk drive. Should you buy now or wait a year? Should you lease, pay cash, or take out a loan? Want to move to a bigger home with a two-room office suite? How much can you afford to spend?

There are formulas for arriving at dollar figures that will help answer questions like these. PercentEdge, a financial calculation program from Timeslips, puts those answers within reach of anyone with a fair understanding of concepts like amortization (the schedule of payments for a loan broken down into interest and principal), variable interest rates, balloon payments (amounts you pay in lump sums, often at the end of a loan), and the like.

PercentEdge is easy to get up and running. There are four calculation screens divided into rows and cells like a spreadsheet: a mortgage screen, a variable-rate screen, an amortization screen, and a present-value screen.

You choose, say, the mortgage screen and plug in some of the values, like points, interest rate, term of the loan, amount of the down payment, and the amount you wish to pay monthly. Then you press a key, and the other values in the empty cells are calculated. In this case, you'd find the price you can afford to pay for the house. If you knew the price of the house you want to buy, you could plug in various interest rates to see how much the monthly payment would be at, say, 9 percent versus 10 percent. These calculations would be helpful for any type of loan.

The variable-rate screen helps you figure out how much capital you can accumulate in savings at various interest rates, making regular or single-sum deposits or withdrawals. The amortization screen figures your monthly payments when interest rates and many other variables change, such as missed payments, balloon payments, and varied payment amounts. The present-value screen is the most difficult to master, but it's the one you'll need to evaluate the pros and cons of buying new equipment with cash, leasing it, and taking out a loan.

This program is aimed at professionals who use these calculations in their work, and there's room for a lot of sophisticated details, like Cost of Living Allowances and other wrinkles, in these formulas. The well-organized manual provides solid explanations and a glossary with brief but helpful definitions. In addition, clear, step-by-step examples abound, both on-line and in the manual.

Ease of use for this program is in the eye of the beholder. The actual computing is a snap. On the conceptual side, the learning curve is steeper, though not insurmountable. Anyone who's bought a house and is comfortable with mortgage schedules should find the mortgage, amortization, and variable-rate screens fairly clear, but the present-value screen might prove a bit tough for those without more of a background in finance.

Error handling was good but not problem-free. Working in memory-resident mode, I had printer problems after exiting to DOS. I'd printed the mortgage screen, and my printer kept printing everything I typed after the DOS prompt. When I rebooted and ran the program as a stand-alone, the problem didn't recur. My only other difficulty was with PercentEdge's eagerness to start calculating once I plugged in values--however, you can turn this auto-calculation function off. I occasionally pressed Return to get to the next cell only to find the program flashing the message PATIENCE while it started calculating. Since it meant no more than a 30-second wait in most cases, this was only a minor annoyance.

Technical support, not a toll-free number, is free only for the first 30 days after the first call--after that you pay $50 per year. When I called, I had to wait a minute or so, but was treated well by the PercentEdge guru when the person who originally answered the phone was stumped. The problem I called with turned out to be a silly mistake on my part, but the answer I got was congenial and complete. I had less luck with support when I called about a printing problem that eventually disappeared on its own. I waited more than an hour for a return call, and the same guru was unable to figure out what had caused the difficulty or how to avoid it in the future.

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Calculating your finances - Timeslips Corp.'s PercentEdge mortgage program - evaluation

Home Office Computing, June, 1991 by Lisa Kleinholz

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