Cashing In, Speaking Volumes, Netting News

Three business people each review a different business software package that they might use.

New software packages help you manage your finances, speak your mind, and find business information on-line. Our CEO reviewers judge their worth

Software
CashÉ from Business Matters Inc., Waltham, Mass. (800-993-3600; price $995), a financial-modeling and -forecasting program

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Reviewer
Corley Phillips (102623.3316@compuserve.com), director of several technology companies, including Telephone Response Technologies, in Roseville, Calif., which develops and markets interactive voice-response systems for small businesses

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Requirements
486 with 8 MB RAM; 3.5-inch floppy-disk drive; 10 MB hard-disk space; graphics display compatible with Microsoft Windows 3.1 or higher; DOS 3.1 or higher; mouse

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Ever sit down in front of a blank spreadsheet and find your eyes glazing over? If so, CashÉ may be just what you need to snap to. It enables you to create detailed financial forecasts in a matter of hours, guiding you as you work your way from the high-level premises underlying an operating plan to customized spreadsheets ready for you to fill in.

CashÉ's user interface comprises a series of screens topped by tabs, to simulate a file of Pendaflex folders -- the perfect device for breaking down the planning process. The main screen displays three folders: Scenarios, for the actual financials, beginning balances, and basic information about the business; Assumptions, for the details of the business plan, such as sales and expenses, payroll, and assets; and Statements and Analysis, the balance sheets, income statements, and cash-flow statements the program prepares after all the information has been entered. The idea is that the user will create various scenarios, each with a different set of assumptions, to figure out the financial tack to take.

I turned to CashÉ to evaluate the various financing routes open to Telephone Response Technologies (TRT), from continued self-funding through profits to increasing sales more rapidly through an equity investment. To see the impact on the all-important cash balance, I created several scenarios, or financial plans, each of which was supported by different assumptions about the level of outside investment and, therefore, the amount of expenses that could be supported and the resulting increase in revenue from those expenditures.

I began at the bottom, a scenario that assumed no outside funding. I then added a substantial marketing campaign that I assumed would take 90 days to produce incremental revenues. The program let me quickly update the marketing expenses and change my revenue assumptions to see how much outside financing the campaign would require. By the end of the day, I'd learned that a relatively modest sale of stock would increase TRT's revenues and profits by more than 30%.

The program's analytical tools are impressive. In addition to income statements, balance sheets, and cash-flow statements that compare user-defined periods, CashÉ generates a so-called Big Picture, which summarizes those reports and presents several popular financial ratios and a graph depicting annual sales. The Big Picture also lays out a more detailed analysis in graphic form showing trends and variances, return on equity, and other key indicators.

I used CashÉ version 1.1b, which has some of the problems regularly encountered in first releases of software. Getting the exact statement I wanted was at times a challenge: I had to play with printer margins to avoid having data and headings collide on the page, and the program is hardheaded about what it will produce. For example, if you enter actuals, you can get an actuals balance sheet compared to at least one period of future projections or a list of all actuals including the balance sheet, but you cannot get just the actuals balance sheet itself. (The manufacturer claims that with version 1.2, which it released in mid-January, you can get the actuals balance sheet.) I wound up printing beginning balances and manually cutting out the balance sheet -- with scissors, not a mouse. And though you can easily add assumptions as you build your plan, they don't show up on the final statements. For me as a consultant, that means my clients don't have the benefit of knowing, say, that I forecast expenses by setting them to a percentage of sales -- unless I make a point of explaining my logic. A printed list of assumptions accompanying the final statements would make this competent, straightforward program hard to beat.

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Software

DragonDictate (Classic Edition), from Dragon Systems Inc., Newton, Mass. (800-TALKTYP; price $695), a voice-activation program (the program also comes in a Personal Edition for $395 and a Power Edition for $1,695)

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Reviewer

Jordan E. Ayan (jordan@create-it.com), president of Create-It! Inc., a business consulting firm in Naperville, Ill.

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Requirements

486/66 MHz IBM-compatible; 12 MB RAM (Pentium PC with 16 MB RAM recommended); 7 MB dedicated memory; 36 MB hard-disk space; certified 16-bit sound card

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If ever there was an application I wanted to love, DragonDictate, a PC-based dictation program, was it. HAL, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, whetted my appetite for a computer that could understand my speech. And experience with a pocket dictator and a great personal assistant sold me on the value of dictation for someone on the go. So when I installed DragonDictate on my IBM Thinkpad 755CD, I was ready to move up to a new level of productivity. Sadly, that was not to be.