Business Plan Help

June 25, 2003

With your computer and the right software, you can create a business plan that’s structured, comprehensive and specific for the needs of your business. Sure, you’ll need to do some work too, but you’ll find plenty of help when you use one of the programs for business plan development. Here are two we like:

Business Plan Pro 2003 (Palo Alto, Windows, $99.95, $299 for the Premier Edition) is a comprehensive, detail-oriented program that uses an EasyPlan Wizard to take you step by step through the items needed to develop your plan. Each step is fully explained with text and narration and includes tips and items to consider. Fill in with your own text or look at some of the examples and adapt them to your needs. Some of the sections come with tables and charts to fill in with your own info. Complete instructions and lots of suggestions for including data in these tables and charts are provided to help you along. An Expert Analysis feature checks your financials for accuracy and your plan for completeness. When your plan is printed, the charts and tables are automatically inserted at the proper place.

This comprehensive program even includes help on using your plan with Quicken, Quickbooks and various Microsoft Office tools. There are 400+ sample business plans for you to study as references. The manual that comes with the program is more a book on developing business plans than just a simple user manual. Also included with the program is the book Hurdle: The Book on Business Planning by Tim Berry a well known business consultant.

Professional Business PlanMaker Deluxe (Individual Software Windows 98/Me/2000/NT/XP with Pentium, $69.95) is arranged in five sections: General, Sales, Expenses, Launch and Plan. The General section starts with questions that you need to answer with detailed information regarding the question(s) included. For example, when asking, "What is the name of your business?" the program explains that your business name should clearly relate to the product or services offered so potential customers know what you are. Various types of businesses are explained, such as sole proprietorship, C-corporation, Limited Liability corporation and the like. There are also questions about employees and benefits and other details. For some of the questions, the program suggests a starting point.

The next section is Sales, where you need to do a projection in spreadsheet format. The programs recommends a 36-month period and helps with useful information and suggestions. The Expenses section insures you account for all the bits and pieces that go into making up the costs of your products or services so you don’t forget to include costs such as repairs and maintenance, franchise fees or entertaining. In the Launch section you’ll need to consider items needed to buy, cash on hand, loans, inventory and more. The program handles this section in a question-and-answer format, with guidelines and background information.

Once you’ve done all the preliminary work, you’ll go on to the Plan section. The window here is divided into three parts. One part is the index that lists the key sections, such as Executive Summary, Company Background, Products, Services Marketing Plan and such. The next part is the topic Guide/Examples. This part provides a valuable discussion of what needs to be included in each section, along with a sample plan demonstrating the points in the discussion.

The third part is the text entry, where you have to do your part in writing that section of your business plan. And don’t forget that all-important Request, i.e. what you want from the reader of the plan: money, loan, partnership individuals, franchise, etc. When done, print the plan. Professional Business PlanMaker Deluxe automatically formats and paginates the plan. Or you can export the plan into your word processor for additional editing or custom formatting. Because of the tabular nature of the financial data, you can use the plan in "what-if" scenarios, such as What-if sales aren’t as high as expected or what-if expenses are lower than expected.

Other features in the program include charts such as Profit and Loss, Cash Summary, Break-Even Analysis and Reports such as Balance Summary, and Ratio Analysis. An extensive Resource section is provided as an up-to-date bibliographic listing of organizations, articles, books, on-line resources and more relating to business and business plan development.

On-line help is available within the program. An included 264-page printed manual has helpful and useful information, tips and examples of how business plans helped people, including 80 pages of tips, tricks, advice and anecdotes from the book, What No One Ever Tells You About Starting Your Own Business, by Jan Norman. Also included in the program are 25 sample business plans, two of which are included in the printed manual. These plans give you a chance to see the detail that a finished plan includes.

Be aware that either of these programs don’t do the work of creating a plan for you. But they do provide a highly organized framework to insure that you include all the important information, and they do help you at every step.

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