TIP 3002

TOPIC: Calculating Monthly Payments in LeadCommander

Note: While you can calculate monthly payments based on the contents of any field in LeadCommander, the following example uses LeadCommander's Loan Amt. field located on the Site layout.

Scenario:

You are a lender who markets to a certain group of contacts in your database whenever interest rates drop. You want to calculate monthly payments for the group of records based on the new lower interest rate of 7% APR for a 30-year term, so that you have instant access to the payment information should the contacts you marketed to call in for more information.

How it's done:

1) Find the records you want to perform the calculation upon.

2) In any one of the records, place your cursor in the field in which you want the payment (result of calculation) inserted. In this example, let's use Free Field Num 1.

3) Choose Replace on the top button bar, then choose the Replace with Calculate Result option. Enter the following calculation in the calculation workspace:

PMT ( Loan Amt, .07/12, 360)

4) Choose OK, then Replace.

VOILA! Now, every record has a monthly payment in the Num 1 field based on the values in their Loan Amt. fields!

Detailed explanation of PMT calculation:

The calculation function PMT is followed by parameters contained within the open parentheses, and separated by commas. The first parameter represents the field or data upon which the calculation is performed. In this example we chose the Loan Amt. field. The second parameter represents the interest rate, in this case 7% per year, which is inserted as a decimal '.07', followed by '/12' to indicate an annual percentage rate. The last parameter is the term, which we said earlier was 30 years or 360 months.

Variation:

You can also use LeadCommander's Round function to round the payment result to two decimal places by inserting the PMT calculation within the Round function, like this:

Round ( PMT ( Loan Amt, .07/12, 360) , 2)

which would return, for example, 2500.00.

For more information on how to use Calculations and Functions, see the LeadCommander User's Guide and the Performing Calculations and Functions in LeadCommander tip.