Get ready for our new calculation engine

We developed a new calculation engine called FormulaScript, which has many advantages for our users. It is up to 100x as efficient, and gives us more freedom to adjust and add new formulas. As of July 15th, 2022, published calculators will remain on our old engine, and a manual switch is necessary.

Our formula engine that supports all Excel formulas is really the core of our product. We are incredibly proud to have improved our engine further. The new engine is very efficient. You will definitely notice the difference with more extensive and more complex calculators. The new engine also enables us to introduce new functions and improve existing functions.

We spent months testing our new formula engine. That said, we have chosen a careful route to introduce the new engine for active calculators. This is why our current formula engine is retained alongside the new engine for a transition period of 1-2 months. After which all calculators will be transferred to our new engine.

For published calculators, we ask you to check all calculations before adopting the new engine in the general settings of your calculator. When you experience differences in results, please reach out. See the Q&A below for potential causes.

What is the main difference between the old and new engine

SPEED! Our new engine is 100x more efficient. You will especially notice the difference with larger and more complex calculators. Each tiny update to the calculator triggers a calculation on all variables, formulas, and conditional logic. Causing some calculators to become sluggish. Not anymore though!

Furthermore, the new engine enables us to improve current functions, introduce (special) functions, allow comments in the formula builder, and much more!

What could cause differences in calculations between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ calculation engine?

Our new formula engine handles calculations more strictly and therefore returns a correct result. Where our old engine, in some cases, would accept missing arguments, the new engine will throw an error. In case of an error in the function, the entire formula will throw an error. This is also the case when an error resides in one of the used variables.

E.g., an IF-statement needs 3 arguments (condition, value_if_true, value_if_false). The old parser would accept 2 arguments (condition, value_if_true) and return a 0 for the value_if_false. The new parser will return an error.

What should you do when your formulas suddenly return an error?

The error is usually easy to fix. Please check your formulas to see if the functions are correct. If you cannot find the cause of the difference or error, just reach out, and we will prioritize your support.

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