Fun with numbers - Software Review - Brightridge Solutions Inc.'s Hi, Finance! 2.18 business and financial calculator - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, May, 1993 by Linda Stern

Hi, Finance!

Rating: * * * *

For Windows

AT A GLANCE: A financial and business calculator for the Windows environment.

EASE OF USE: Point-and-click directness guides you through the program.

DOCUMENTATION: Minimalist, but not really needed; the program is self-explanatory, with full-featured on-screen help.

SUPPORT: The person who wrote the program, Roger Hoover, answers, ready to inform.

VERSION REVIEWED: 2.18

LIST PRICE: $59

STREET PRICE RANGE: N/A; shareware

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: 2MB 386 PC or higher (4MB recommended); hard-disk drive; EGA, VGA, SVGA; DOS 3.3 and Windows 3.0 or higher

PUBLISHER: Brightridge Solutions, 1534 Brightridge Dr., Kingsport, TN 37664; (615) 246-3337, (800) 241-7203

You can learn a lot from working and playing with Hi, Finance? This comprehensive business and financial calculator teaches how your money grows to retirement, how loans are front-loaded with interest, how to judge whether your investments are performing as they should, and much, much more.

And all this education is sort of like a bonus; the real purpose of the program is that it does all of these calculations for you. Want to refinance your mortgage? Type in the amount, interest rate, and term of the loans, and Hi, Finance? will display or print out a complete payment and amortization chart.

Want to face down future tuition bills once and for all? Tell the program how much you'll need and when, and it will tell you how much to save monthly.

The program's biggest advantages come not in the financial calculators that, admittedly, many programs now offer but in the five business utilities included. Product resellers can use Hi, Finance! to calculate optimum markups, add sales taxes, and figure out how many widgets to order for the most economic balance of inventory carrying costs and reordering expenses.

Break-even business analysis. Best of all, the program includes a break-even analysis that can push any would-be entrepreneur to confront his dreams in dollars and cents.

Want to start a newsletter? Say you have $5,000 to promote it (fixed costs) and that it will cost you $7.20 a year (variable unit costs) to mail out each subscription that you sell. Plan to price the subscription at $29, and Hi, Finance? shows you--in numbers and graphs--that you will have to sell 229 subscriptions to break even. If you want to make $15,000 a year on the newsletter, you will either have to sell 900 subscriptions or raise the price to $35 and sell 750 subscriptions. Even if you never want to start a newsletter, you can learn a lot about break-even pricing just by entering hypothetical numbers into Hi, Finance?

Try it before you buy it. Hi, Finance? is distributed as shareware, so if you can find it on a bulletin board or shareware disk, you can try it before you buy it. Pay the fee and register with Brightridge, and you will receive the 80-page manual and learn about the program's regular updates.