Business Plan Template: A Practical Framework for Creating Your Business Plan, business plan financial template.

Although even the best-crafted plan may not survive its first contact with reality, the act of planning is still invaluable for any business owner.

Once you’ve done the strategic work, it’s time to put it into action and write your plan. Download the business plan template, and review our guide on writing a business plan for additional information.

Business planning is often used to secure funding, but plenty of business owners find writing a plan valuable, even if they never work with an investor. That’s why we put together a free business plan template to help you get started.

There are some high-level strategic guidelines beyond the advice included in this free business plan template that can help you write an effective, complete plan while minimizing busywork.

A professional business plan example to inspire you

• Executive summary. A one-page summary of your whole plan, typically written after the rest of the plan is completed.
• Company description. An overview can include many potential sub-sections, from the basics (your type of business model) to the meaningful (your business’ vision and mission statement).
• Market analysis. Everything from estimated market size to your target markets. It’ll also include a competitive analysis of your industry to address competitors strengths and weaknesses.
• Products and services. What you sell and the most important features of your products or services. It’ll also include any plans for intellectual property, like patent filings or copyright. If you do market research for your products, it’ll show up in this section of your business plan.
• Marketing plan. How you intend to get the word out about your business, and what strategic decisions you’ve made about things like your pricing strategy.
• Logistics and operations plan. Everything that needs to happen to turn your raw materials into products and get them into the hands of your customers.
• Financial plan. It’s important to include a look at your financial projections. This section includes templates for three key financial statements: an income statement, a balance sheet, and a cash-flow statement.

Our fictional business creates custom greeting cards with your pet’s paw prints on them, and the founder of the business is writing a plan to help understand the market, as well as the logistics and costs involved, to give themselves the best chance of success before they launch.

• Know your audience. If you’re writing a business plan for yourself in order to get clarity on your ideas and your industry as a whole, you may not need to include the same level of detail or polish you would with a business plan you want to send to potential investors. Knowing who will read your plan will help you decide how much time to spend on it.
• Know your goals. Understanding the goals of your plan can help you set the right scope. If your goal is to use the plan as a roadmap for growth, you may invest more time in it than if your goal is to understand the competitive landscape of a new industry.
• Take it step by step. Writing a 10- to 15-page document can feel daunting, so try to tackle one section at a time. Select a couple of sections you feel most confident writing and start there—you can start on the next few sections once those are complete. Jot down bullet-point notes in each section before you start writing to organize your thoughts and streamline the writing process.

Business plans often are used to secure funding, but plenty of businesses find writing a plan valuable, even if they never work with an investor. That’s why we put together a free business plan template to help you get started.

The cash flow projection shows how cash is expected to flow in and out of your business. It is an important tool for cash flow management because it indicates when your expenditures are too high or if you might need a short-term investment to deal with a cash flow surplus. As part of your business plan, the cash flow projection will show how much capital investment your business idea needs.

Think of your business expenses as two cost categories: your start-up expenses and your operating expenses. All the costs of getting your business up and running should be considered start-up expenses. These may include:

For your business plan, you should create a pro forma balance sheet that summarizes the information in the income statement and cash flow projections. A business typically prepares a balance sheet once a year.

Now you can begin to put together your financial statements for your business plan starting with the income statement.

The Income Statement

Not all of the categories in this income statement will apply to your business. Eliminate those that do not apply, and add categories where necessary to adapt this template to your business.

The relationship between these elements of financial data is expressed with the equation: Assets = Liabilities + Equity.

For investors, the cash flow projection shows whether your business is a good credit risk and if there is enough cash on hand to make your business a good candidate for a line of credit, a short-term loan, or a longer-term investment. You should include cash flow projections for each month over one year in the financial section of your business plan.

The financial section of your business plan determines whether or not your business idea is viable and will be the focus of any investors who may be attracted to your business idea. The financial section is composed of four financial statements: the income statement, the cash flow projection, the balance sheet, and the statement of shareholders' equity. It also should include a brief explanation and analysis of these four statements.

1. Download the free trial of PDF Converter OCR, install and launch on your mac
   • Create business plan in PDF from other document type (Word, PowerPoint, ePub, HTML, Text, CHM, Image, etc)

     First, choose the business plan template in your field, then preview the templates in the newly opened webpage and choose one. Those come with a “Buy” icon are not free, those come with a “Free Download” icon are for free use.

     • It helps organize your thoughts and enables you to have a quick startup instead of wasting lots of time and efforts on impractical guidelines

       How to Create Your Own Business Plan Basing on A PDF Template?

       

       Steps to Create Your Own Business Plan with PDF Converter OCR

       While for Windows users, there are more choices than that for mac users, here we recommend Readiris 16 for Windows, as many users do.

       1. Download Readiris 16 for Windows, install and launch on your Windows PC.
       2. Click “Insert” to open the business plan template PDF with the program.
       3. Choose the language and output format.
       4. Save the file onto your Windows PC.
       5. Open the editable version of your business plan template, then edit in defaulted processor to create your own business plan.

       You can find several business plan template in PDF for different business program. Just click on the “Download this plan” and get the free template in PDF.

       

       Since this can be a daunting process, here are some general tips to help you begin your research:

       Whatever your reason for writing a business plan, the task will probably still feel like a homework assignment. When you’re starting a new business, your to-do list is a mile long and filled with more immediately rewarding tasks, like taking product photos, creating ad campaigns, and opening social media accounts.

       Here are some of the components you should include in your company overview:

       This information will vary based on what you’re selling, but you should be specific enough that it’s unquestionably clear who you’re trying to reach—and more importantly, why you’ve made the choices you have based on who your customers are and what they value.

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       This section should signal to your reader that you’ve got a solid understanding of your supply chain and strong contingency plans in place to cover potential uncertainty. If your reader is you, it should give you a basis to make other important decisions, like how to price your products to cover your estimated costs, and at what point you plan to break even on your initial spending.

       Promotion may be the bulk of your plan since you can more readily dive into tactical details, but the other three areas should be covered at least briefly—each is an important strategic lever in your marketing mix.

       

       Financial models are created to portray some of or all the aspects of a business. But for startups, financial plans are roadmaps. A startup financial model enables entrepreneurs to understand their cash and to determine their burn-rate. This is crucial for a firm, as it makes one conscious of how long money will last and what milestones can be achieved with the given expenditures.

       A bottoms up startup financial model: It is one with an existing 5-15 core assumptions about the business, that is most useful for firms considering specific product direction, distribution strategy, or partnership that can potentially be a big impulse for the company.

       A startup business plan gives entrepreneurs some assumptions, from which they can make rational projections of costs and income for a startup financial model. Hence, different pieces can be brought together to get an overall picture of the firm (your costs, revenue, cash-flow summaries and profit & loss statements) based on a variety of assumptions.

       Although the projections do not need to be correct all times, the assumptions, however, are key. The assumptions tell whether the entrepreneur has given some thought to the startup’s potential market share, its competitors, adoption rates, etc. This is key for investors. Given the overall picture, the startup financial model enables you to depict the strengths and weaknesses of your assumptions. It pushes you to go back to your business model and revise it, in order to further develop it into a more successful instrument.

       What is a Startup Financial Model?

       A top down startup financial model: it one that works for a company which, for example, is aware it will need to go out and raise $X million in a Series A round in a given time frame and has gathered data on what sorts of revenue, margins, or growth numbers it needs to achieve to have a successful fundraise.

       To customize your Startup Financial Excel Model Template to your firm, assumptions will need to be changed so specific results can be projected. Also, if you wish to add more value to your startup financial model, you may enrich it with more variables too. For example, you may add volume growth rates and number of salesmen to integrate a “What If” analyses into your model.

       You do not need to be a professional to design a Startup Financial model. To create a startup financial model for your own company, you do not need to be a finance expert. What an entrepreneur needs is the right set of tools, specially a startup financial model Excel template to get started.