Documention for LOAN.BA v1.1 By Andrew McDonald (C)1987 Custom Software Systems --------------------------------------- LOAN.BA is a program that can help you find out the best way to pay a loan or see if you can afford the loan in the first place. You may enter any of the values and calculate the missing one. Once you are happy with the values you can make a chart showing payment #, interest paid, Principal paid and remaining pricipal. This chart can be printed out to RAM or a printer. The program is very simple to use. Just run the program and you will see the values(all set to 0 except for Payments per year which defaults to 12). To change a value, hit the function key for that value. For instance to enter the principal you would hit F1. When you have entered all but the value you need to calculate, hit F6 for calculate. The bottom line will change to show you the items you are allowed to figure. Press the function key under the item you wish to calculate. The computer will calculate the number and put it in its place with an asterisk(*) to show which value you have calculated. If there is an error in your data, you will hear 2 beeps and the ERROR message will be displayed. Check your data and try again. After you have calculated the missing amount, a total will also be shown. This is the total of the payments or in other words, how much the loan will cost you to pay back. Subracting out the Principal amount will tell you how much interest you will pay on the loan. When you have all the values, you may wish to make a chart of the payments. To do this hit F7(Chrt). This function will only be available when all the values have been calculated. The computer will ask Device or Printer?. Enter P for printer or D for RAM(or any other device). When you hit "D" the computer will prompt you for a file name. You may use device names such as LCD: for screen or COM: for a serial printer or just a regular file name up to 6 characters. The computer will write the chart while showing you what it is writing. When it is finished, it will return to the normal screen. You may change any values and print another chart if you wish. Although the main program will handle very large amounts($1000000 at 21% for 30 years) the charting section may go crazy trying to format all those big numbers. It should handle most normal amounts though. Also, the final payment may not be exactly the same as the normal amount. This is because of rounding errors. The amount will be pretty close except when you have calculated number of payments. In that case the last payment will be the leftover principle plus the interest on that amount. If you get an error while printing a chart then it either means you ran out of memory or there was a problem with the output device. Check everything and try again. If you have any problems or suggestions, let me know. Andrew McDonald Custom Software Systems CIS 76672,650