Proposed amendments to SOA Calculator

Clariman

Thanks for your suggestions for enhancing the calculator. Having discussed it with a couple of debt experts (one a CAB advisor), looked at the benefits versus effort involved and considered what is technically feasible, I have come up with the following proposed amendments. Some of the suggestions came from TMF (where the calculator is also widely used), so you may not recognise some of them.

Feel free to disagree with them and discuss. Clariman

Suggestions which I will implement

1. Create a new calculator that takes the user's SOA and reformats it into the categories used by CAB and CCCS (formats using Common Financial Statement categories). This will help people who take an SOA to one of these organisations for help.

2. Add an option to create a print format suitable for sending to a creditor (without Assets and without the Balance sheet etc) including a pro-rata "offer to creditors" when user can't meet min payments.

3. Collect additional information e.g. How many adults and children in household.

4. Make it clearer how to save data (and to check for cookies being accepted)

5. "Surplus(deficit if negative)" not understood by everyone. Use clearer terminology to show that negative is bad.

6. Add in an auto-copy function so that the calculator automatically copies the correct text from the format window into a post. (if I can find a way to technically do this, then I will)

Suggestions which I may implement

7. Add an option to create a snowball plan from the unsecured debts that are listed in SOA. I would like to do this but think it may not be feasible without over-complicating the SOA Calculator.

8. Check for extreme values in data entry fields (e.g. Annual data entered as monthly) and put out a warning message

9. Cater for users who have multiple properties (e.g. Buy to let) by having space for up to 3 mortgages, loans and property assets. This is not a trivial change so will not come soon. However, it will go on the To Do list.

10. Multi-save option to cater for more than one SOA being saved. If I can find a simple and elegant way of doing this, then I will.

11. Provide 'hover-over' help on input fields. Might be useful but could clutter up the screen.

Suggestions that I won't implement (sorry)

12. Add a Notes/Comments field after each expenditure/income item for explanatory notes (when phone contract will end etc.). This is good idea but would require a wholescale redesign of the input form which I am reluctant to do. A user can always enter additional information in the body of their text when they post an SOA.

13. Adding in credit card limits to unsecured debts table. While this may help users to identify whether the poster has any scope for transferring a debt from an expensive card to a cheaper card, this is outweighed by the fact that it means yet more information for the poster to collect before posting an SOA.

14. Cater for budget versus actual expense and show graphically how debt is reducing over time. This is beyond the scope of what the calculator is for. This kind of thing can be done in spreadsheets or packages such as MS Money or Quicken.

15. Add in a Save to Excel option Benefit. The Format for Print option can be copy-and-pasted into Excel very successfully. To make this easier, I will move the descriptive text to the bottom of the Format for Print i.e. to keep all the tabular data together.

16. Provide some form of guideline amounts for expense categories. Not a bad idea, but it would encourage users to post what they see as an "acceptable" SOA rather than a real one. Also the "acceptable" amounts would vary depending on what the SOA was being used for.

17. Add a line in for Child Maintenance under Expenses. I'm not planning to do this as the "Other child related expenses" covers it. However, if you feel strongly that it should be a separate category then it could be done.