If you model cashflows in Excel, then you will love this product

Pros: This product helps you to build properly responsive, elegant and maintainable models in Excel. If you pride yourself on avoiding plugged numbers in the middle of your projections, and you like to see your assumptions neatly flowing through your model, with formulas that you can copy from one side of a cashflow to the other, then you'll know how frustrating it gets to do this properly. You end up with formulas that cover three lines of the screen, and they're just not maintainable.

That's what BusinessFunctions is all about: you get functions with real-world parameters like start/stop dates and growth rates, which you can copy across your cashflow. The functions do the hard work of switching on the appropriate cashflow items for each period, and you're free to focus on your modelling.

On top of that, there's some fearsomely clever stuff to make your figures 100% consistent with payment dates or accruals - and you can switch from cash to accruals basis just by changing parameters.

Oh, and there's a very neat trick in most of the functions for combining multiple cashflows - enter a range of dates, say, and the functions automatically sum all the resulting cashflows.

I use this product every day, and I wouldn't consider building a serious cashflow without it.

Cons: Not much - just be prepared to do some reading when you're getting started, so that you understand what you're getting into.

Posted: 23-Sep-2006 05:06:24 AM