Project Overview :
Project Continuum is an open source financial modeling and simulation environment developed for WIndows using Microsoft VisualStudio.NET  C# and is .Net 2.0 compatible. It does not require or use a database, but simple XML text files (which can be encrypted) to store the projector, funds, and actors.  It is hopefully easy enough to used by average users, however it might require a bit of learning about how the program works. This documentation is intended to do that, making it as easy as possible while still covering all features.

Project Continuum is organized around personal finance. It attempts to provide a level of structure to your financial modeling which is easier and more useful than a simple spreadsheet. It allows you to model past financial history as well as simulating potential future finances. It handles interactions between funds, calculating interest, principle, and other statistics to improve analysis of the models and projections.

Program Concepts :
Project Continuum's modeling and simulation environment is accomplished using various organizations which the user should be aware of.  It uses the concepts of Funds, Transactions, Balances, Actors, Activities and a Projector to modeling past financial history as well as projecting future financial balances.  It also derives its own index rating for the purpose of managing your debt-to-value ratio.

Funds : These can be checking accounts, saving accounts, IRA, 401K, auto loans, mortgages etc. These form the fundamental items whose balances you wish to track, project, and analyse over time.

Actor : This class represents a scheduled monetary impacts (or flows) on or between funds in the Continuum projector. Actors allow projections. An actor might be a recurring paycheck, a repeated series of deposits to savings account, a car payment, a mortgage payment, etc.

Activities : This class is key to the executing 'engine' of the projector. Actors and Fund reconciles are vectored up in activities and then the projector sequences these activities and executes them individually. Their execution is influenced by fund's interim (running) balance.

Projector : This is the managing 'controller' of the model / simulation.  It is a container for all your funds, actors, activities so that you can save them as a single entity.  It is also responsible for running the projections and performing certain analsysis.

Program Features :

Project Continuum features are organized around :

Main Screen - where you can view and analyse data once it is already input.
Guided Checking - where you can easily add Checking Accounts.
Guided Savings - where you can easily add Savings Accounts (or CDs).
Guided AutoLoan - where you can easily add Auto Loans or loans for other depreciable assets.
Guided Mortgage - where you can easily add Mortgage Loans or loans for other equitable assets.
Guided Transactions - where you can easily add individual payments.
Advanced Actors - where you can view/add/edit/delete any of the actors in the continuum.
Advanced Funds - where you can view/add/edit/delete any of the funds in the continuum.
Advanced Historical Balances - where you can reconcile any fund in the continuum.
Advanced Projector - where you edit continuum-level settings such as default render timeframe.
Market Funds - where you can add/edit/remove a collection of publicly traded funds to track.
Download Fund Performance - where you can download a funds historical performance from yahoo web service