Financial Calculators

Need for easy accessibility and cheaper options in finance software gave rise to one of the important categories in finance software called financial calculators. These calculators range from

calculating loan EMI’s (Equated Monthly Installment) to make rent vs. buy decisions to calculation of very complex parameters of market risk like VaR (Value at Risk).

These financial calculators form a separate class because of their low system requirement, low maintenance cost and also low price. These calculators are based in input-process-output kind of a model where a user inputs required parameters, these parameters are then churned in an algorithm to give desired output. The various categories for these calculators are Mortgage, Home loans, Equity, Auto loans, Investments calculations, Retirement planning, Credit Card payment calculations, Debt management, Checking and savings, managing college finance, managing taxes and managing personal finance.

There are many organizations which provide these calculators both as a stand alone system as well as SaaS (software as a service). Advances in internet technology and increase in internet bandwidth has made these calculators available on internet also, which are either free or require a very little fee to use them.

Some of the well known online vendors for financial calculators are

Yahoo Finance http://finance.yahoo.com/calculator/index

CNN Money http://money.cnn.com/

Dinkytown www.dinkytown.net/financialcalculators.html

Bankrate.com http://www.bankrate.com/brm/calculators/manage-money.asp

Finaid.com http://www.finaid.org/calculators/

Though these financial calculators are easily available and less costly to use, security and ability to handle complex data may be the question to moot upon. Therefore banks and other big corporate houses may prefer building in-house finance applications or finding a reliable vendor who can provide these product or services. But if we see the holistic picture the finance calculators easily available on internet has definitely empowered the customer who can easily analyse the data available with him and make a decision which is best suited for him. The financial race is on and on an accelerated mode, let financial calculators help us accelerate