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Case Study: North American Energy Company The client has an extremely sophisticated approach to debt and treasury management. They needed a function for their spreadsheet that would either optimize or elminate circularity and model debt at a very fine-grained level. The fact that various loan advances, interest payments and fees were paid at odd dates through the month meant that a conventional spreadsheet just could not model it accurately, let alone with acceptable performance. With all work carried out long-distance from the UK, we produced a function that slashed calculation times, modelling individual projected drawdowns to daily accuracy. The function is a variation of our LoanAcctEM array function, which essentially sweeps up the free cashflow from a projection and applies interest to it. The custom version does a lot more, As well as the freely available documentation for Residual Cash family, we developed bespoke documentation online that is under constant update. Custom EditionsCustom Editions of Business Functions can be developed for customers wo have quite individual needs. Although we try to meet all our clients generic functions when these are called for, there are times when a set of bespoke functions are just perfect for addressing key modelling requirements.Examples include:
A Custom Edition is essentially a 'Pro Plus' edition. It includes all the functions of the pro Edition, and addition, a category of functions is developed for the client. The functions are just like any other Business Function - they are documented in the help file, use the same parameters where appropriate, and have spreadsheet examples in their use. They all use the BF 'engine'. The Custom Edition (you can call it what you wish) will be downloadable from your own web page and you will be notified on a regular basis of upgrades. The Edition is updated along with the other editions in the library. The advantage of a Custom Edition is that you get functions that are very precisely tailored to your need, and for important applications, this is no less than what is required. It is also very cost effective because instead of hiring a developer, C++ programmer or whatever to develop an application from scratch, you can 'piggy-back' on the back of the BF engine. You also can take some comfort in the fact that significant parts of your bespoke functions will use tested standard components from the rest of the BF Library. You won't be re-inventing the wheel. For your own bespoke functions, you also receive the C++ code, so you can see what your function(s) are doing. This is not standalone runnable code, because it will inevitably depend on calls to the rest of the BF library, but it will be sufficient for understanding and documentation. A code example for the Some of things we can re-use to great effect in your custom part of the library include our accurate daycount arithmetic, our in-function iterative solver (eg IRR), and our rental and loan routines. As with the bespoke service we operate over the internet for the technical assistance service, but are available within reason for face-to-face meetings, which we cannot recommend highly enough as a way to communicate understanding. The charging basis for a Custom Edition is based on an annual maintenance fee for carrying the Edition as part of our range, that is dependent on the number of functions your bespoke category has. This cost covers our maintenance cost of continuous testing, compilation, bugfixes etc. Then there is Design and Build cost of the functions we build for you which is at normal client rates. You end up with a tailor-made application at a fraction of the cost of a contract programmer, together with the reliability and maintenance benefits of a widely used commercial product. Send Us an Email about Custom Editions |