6. Financial Plan

This section is all about demonstrating your number crunching wizardry.

Have you identified start-up costs to get the business off the ground and forecasted sales for the first two years or so? The money men will want to see your cash-flow forecasts and make sure your books balance. Ultimately, theyll be determining whether this is a financially viable business or not.

To accompany this business plan template, there is a financial planning spreadsheet you can use. Youre free to use the spreadsheet to calculate the financials and then copy and relevant tables and graphs here into the business plan.

6.1 - Start Up Costs

Illustrate your start-up costs here and demonstrate how you will finance them (you could refer to your cash-flow for this). Startup costs can include:

• Equipment

• Software

• Stationary

• Marketing materials

6.2 - Sales Forecasts

Forecast sales for 1-2 years, or as many years as deemed necessary. This is difficult, but has to be done. It helps to use your knowledge of past clients/experience and then apply this to prospective client projects (e.g. you could generalise projects, such as: basic e-commerce website, branding design package, business card design).

Use your pricing calculations to calculate how many hours you have available in a week/month and how many projects you can fit within these hours. You could use your marketing strategy to illustrate when you expect to see a surge in sales or when you predict there might be a lull (e.g. Christmas period).

6.3 - Cash-flow Forecasts

Your cash-flow is used to demonstrate your income and expenditure for each year, displayed on a month-by-month basis. Income can include sales, funding, loans etc. and Expenditure shows your outgoings such as rent, stationary and wages.

6.4 - Other Financials

There are other tables you can include in your financial plan such as a profit & loss account for each year and a balance sheet. Profit & loss is fairly self-explanatory and a balance sheet shows your assets and liabilities.

We got more outside help with these other financial tables/charts than the rest of the business plan. Theres nothing wrong with that and Id definitely recommend getting help with parts youre uncertain about as well as your start-up plan as a whole.

7. Appendix

The appendix is where you put additional information that is referenced in the business plan. This could be things such as:

• Financial charts / graphics

• CVs / Resumes

• References

• Images of work

• Partnership Agreements

I NEED THESE ANSWERED BASED ON A START-UP COMPANY THAT IS PRODUCING PORTABLE BATTERIES FOR LAPTOPS