Are you a whiz at calculating financial information? Not the easy personal stuff, like figuring out your monthly mortgage based on a fixed interest rate for x number of years, or how much money you have available each month after all your bills are paid. (You can probably use your fingers to figure that one out!)

But the hard stuff, you know, the things you need to know when you're running a small business. Things like company and stock valuation, loan consolidation, cost of capital or even the average cost of capital, variable cash flow, operation value with different rates, those types of things?

You've probably heard of these terms but if you're like most small business owners, you wouldn't know how to calculate these results if your business depended on it. Well, guess what? Your business does depend on it!

Before your business idea even gets out of your head and onto paper, you need to be prepared to figure these types of numbers out. If you're planning to do a business plan, which, by the way, is a very good idea, you will need to include an entire section of the business plan devoted entirely to finances. You need to know the break-even point; the break-even point determined using various scenarios, start-up valuation, ROI-ROE, the capacity for growth and more.

And if you ever need to take out a loan for your business, you'll hear terms like payment schedule, even capital amortization, discount notes, rate and payment objectives, refinancing and prepayments. Is your head swimming yet?

You've also probably got an investment or two that you're trying to keep better track of. Stocks, bonds, real estate ? they've each got their own language and their own ways of calculating profit or loss. Do you know how much volatility is involved and the amount of yield of your portfolio? Perhaps at this point you don't even really care!

Then when you go home after a hard day's work, you spouse might even want to talk about if and when you'll be able to buy a new car, or save for the children's college, or plan for retirement.

Sure, you can hire financial analysts to figure out all these numbers for you and handle this type of work as it occurs, but it probably won't be cheap. And if you've got your business on a budget, hiring someone who specializes in numbers certainly will be out of the question.

You can begin surfing the Internet where you'll probably find instructions for properly calculating each of these and other types of figures. You can keep your fingers crossed and hope that you followed the instructions precisely and that the numbers you come up with are the numbers you and others want to see and can rely on.

Or, if you already own a copy of Microsoft Excel, you can purchase a powerful add-on product called Financial Advisor for Excel. This product contains formulas for calculating 73 different types of financial calculations; the types you'll need to run your small business and your growing family.

Financial Advisor for Microsoft Excel is really easy to use, too. For most of the calculations, all you need to do is plug in the numbers. The software then handles all of the calculations and presents them neatly in graphs and tables. And it does all this far more quickly than any professional you will hire and who you will pay by the hour.

Financial Advisor for Microsoft Excel truly does make good financial sense. So do yourself a favor and get yourself a copy today.

Copyright ? 2004 Cavyl Stewart. Get the most out of the software you use everyday. Check out the add-in software directory for more information on Financial Advisor and other great time saving Excel add-in tools, visit: http://www.find-small-business-software.com/excel-addins.html - Also, be sure to check out my Exclusive, 100% free, 100% original content ecourses.