A Word about signs

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A Word about Signs
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When using the financial functions, you must pay careful attention to the positive/negative signs of the values. Different calculators use different conventions for signs. ActiCalc uses the same conventions as Microsoft Excel. If you are already familiar with how Excel uses signs in financial calculations, you can use that same knowledge with ActiCalc.

The simple rule is that any income receives a positive sign and any outflow of money gets a negative sign. Let's apply this rule in an example:

In this case, we put $100 into an investment. This is cash outflow, so we put -100 into PV. We expect this to pay monthly interest of 1% for 12 months, so we put .01 and 12 into % and N respectively. We will make no more payments, nor will we receive progress payments, so we leave PMT as zero. Then we press the

button for the FV register. When the 12 months elapse, we will receive $112.68. Because we will receive this money as income, it has a positive sign.

For additional case studies, see financial examples.

More about advanced functions