Chalem Systems Group: Demos: CFS Bond Calculator

CFS Bond Calculator
Educating and Informing Website Visitors About Financial Issues

FS Bond Calculator is an application that came out of CSG's work for California Financial Services (CFS). CFS provides a wide range of financial and facility-planning services to municipalities and school districts and were ripe for a web-based application. They asked CSG to help.

As a financial services firm with a broad audience, CFS saw the web as a great platform for educating and informing website visitors about financial issues. They wanted to provide a tool for visitors to calculate the property-tax consequences of municipal bond issues being contemplated by government bodies for school construction and other public needs. Mostly, they wanted to give visitors a reason to revisit their site.

Working together with the CFS team, CSG developed the General Obligation Bond Calculator and the Lease/Purchase Financing Calculator and seamlessly incorporated these into CFS's web site. These useful tools give users a legitimate reason to return to the site and, at the same time, help make CFS aware of potential business opportunities.

Under the Hood

What makes these web "Calculators" special is that they depend on specific demographic information about individual California school districts, financial formulas, and pay attention to the nuances of state and federal regulations pertaining to municipal bonds. As part of the project, CSG built a database containing the school district information and created a software component (written in C++) to perform the calculations. CSG then hooked up the calculation engine to a web interface built using Active Server Pages.

The result is an easy-to-use, step-by-step process that can be used by school boards, municipal finance officials, and interested members of the communities.

For a demostration of this web-based application, please contact us.