hey! didnt know there was an excel forum! happy 2 find it. where do i post a question?

[BONES302]

hey!!!! holy crap!!!! didn't know there was a forum for excel. I'm totally pumped up to have found it. i own an automotive customizing shop here in Atlanta. we do all sorts of stuff, rims, tires, tint, stereos, alarms, custom graphics, lift kits, lowering kits, lighting, leather interior, etc etc. So if anyone who reads this post has any questions or needs a deal on something i can provide we ship world wide and i would be glad to help since i am hoping someone here can help me with an issue i am having in excel. Not sure if this is the right place to post a question so if its not let me know and I'll certainly post it there. but here goes...

We recently started offering financing to our customers. The finance company won't give up their "propriety business model". basically they won't tell me how they calculate their interest rate, down payment amount and weekly payment amount. Which i think is stupid because they have a payment calculator right on their site that you can plug in the amount you are financing and it will tell you down payment and weekly payment. Of course you are saying well then why do you need to know how they do it if they do it for you on their website.

The reason i need to know how they do it is so i can build a quick reference spreadsheet so that my sales staff doesn't have to log into to their website hundreds of times a day and fill in a bunch of data just to get a quote for a customer. Their website times out every 10 minutes and before you can get a quote you have a ridiculous form you have to fill out each and every time. So for me its a huge waste of time. If i knew their math i could just put it in a spreadsheet and be done with it.

So what i did was go to their site and spent about 8 hours of typing in data to generate a small spread sheet of amounts of what the lowest i would want to finance up to the highest i think someone would finance in increments starting at $150 and going up to $10,000. i generated a somewhat sliding scale that over the spread of $150 to $10,000 was only off from their calculator by $8 which i can live with. Here is where i screwed up. I pasted the "values" versus the formula into another spreadsheet then i didn't save the original spreadsheet with the formulas. So short of spending another 8 hours doing it all over again i have no way to apply the formulas to another set of financed amounts. All i have right now is 4 columns, one with the financed amounts, one with the down payment amount, one with the weekly payment amount, and one with the total after financing. It would be easy to reverse engineer it but its a sliding scale. there has got to be a wait to reverse engineer a sliding scale to apply the formulas to a new set of predetermined financed amounts i just don't know how to do it. Any suggestions??? i can probably upload them on here somehow if someone needs to take a look. thanks.

[Paul]

Hi Bones, and welcome to the forum.

You can post your question in one of the other sub-forums, as this one is just for introductions. When you do, please create a concise title that describes your problem. I'd also suggest cutting out as much of the text as possible and just get to the point. Provide any sample data as needed, too (you can even attach a workbook - just be sure to leave out any confidential data and replace it with sample data that resembles the type and location).

Thanks!