Free Online Business Financial Planner

Basic & Free Planners for Financial Projections and more ...

Our Exl-Plan range of integrated monthly/quarterly planners includes Exl-Plan Basic which uses annual assumptions to generate comprehensive 5-year projections. This simple, low-cost version (US$29) will meet many business planning needs. Get details, download free trial copy or buy & use now. Also available is a completely free version, Exl-Plan Free, which is identical to Basic but projects for just two years ahead. Details and free download. The Free and Basic versions of Exl-Plan are complemented by other more detailed, powerful versions of Exl-Plan. Get details and download trial copies. All versions of Exl-Plan include a free 150-page Business Plan Guide & Template (for Word).

1. Introduction

PlanWare's Online Business Planner allows a visitor to submit financial assumptions for a new or existing business and to receive fully-integrated five-year financial projections as an Excel spreadsheet file via email. This free service can be used by virtually any type of business with projected annual sales in the range $100,000 to $1 billion, or equivalents in other currencies. The supplied output comprises five-year income statements, cashflow forecasts, balances sheets and ratio analyses.

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2. Background

This online financial planning system is based on the Quik-Plan facility built into our range of financial planners - Exl-Plan. These planners can handle several thousand assumption values and contain about ten thousand built-in formulae. They produce detailed, fully-integrated projections (P&Ls, cashflow statements, balance sheets, ratio analyses, graphs etc.) by month for the first year, quarterly for second & third years and annually thereafter. Quik-Plan is designed to generate high-level, quick an' dirty projections for strategic business planning purposes. It uses several thousand formulae to generate its projections.

Use of the online planner entails (1) completion of the Online Business Planning Form and (2) submission to PlanWare where the assumptions are processed using a specially modified version of Exl-Plan. The results (income statements, cashflow projections, forecast balance sheets, ratio analyses etc.) are sent to the submitter as an email with a file attachment containing an Excel file (*.XLS). This file can be read by Excel releases 5, 7, 8, 95, 97, 2000, XP, 2003 or 2007 running with Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/Vista. Note: If using Lotus 1-2-3, you should be able to read this XLS file.

You can download a sample set of projections here (file name: SAMPLE.XLS -120k - after downloading use Excel to explore its contents).

If you need high-level income and cashflow projections, you should also look at Exl-Plan Free, a fully-integrated, 2-year financial planner for Excel which is available for free and downloadable here.

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3. Procedure

Follow the steps below to get started:

1. Bookmark and/or print this page for future reference.
2. If you need general advice, review our paper on Preparing Financial Projections and pay particular attention to the Tips & Traps. Above all, don't use over-optimistic or unrealistic assumptions. If a start-up, allow for the possibility that it could take much longer and require more funds to get going than expected.
3. There are two ways to complete the Online Business Planning Form:
   
   
   • If you have access to a printer (Recommended method):
     
     
     1. Switch to the Online Business Planning Form and bookmark it.
     2. Use your browser to print the Form, go off-line and use the printed copy as a scratch pad to enter assumptions values.
     3. Get back online to the Form, enter your final assumptions etc. and check that all the tables have been fully completed.
     4. Press the Submit Assumptions Now button and await an acknowledgment.
     
     
     
   • If you prefer to work online:
     
     
     1. Switch to the Online Business Planning Form.
     2. Enter your assumptions etc. into the Form. Be sure to double-check that all the tables have been fully completed.
     3. Press the Submit Assumptions Now button and await an acknowledgment.

Receipt of your assumptions will be automatically acknowledged. Once received, we will send you, within two to three days, an email with an attached Excel file containing your assumptions and projected values as follows:

• Copy of your submitted assumptions along with the results of an automated assessment
• Projected Income Statements for five years
• Projected Cashflow Statements for five years
• Projected Balance Sheets for five years with opening balance sheet
• Ratio Analysis for five years
• Textual Summary Report relating to the projections

Use this Contact Form if you have any problems or difficulties connected with this service. If you would like more information about Quik-Plan and Exl-Plan, click here.

If you prefer, you can download trial versions of our financial planners - Exl-Plan (for Excel) - which incorporate extensive facilities for preparing detailed and high-level projections (P&Ls, cashflows and balance sheets) for up to five years ahead.

Go to the Online Business Planning Form.

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4. Terms & Conditions

This service is provided by PlanWare in accordance with the following terms and conditions:

• As far as practicable, we will email projections to a submitter within one to three days of receiving assumptions. We will post a message to this page if there is likely to be any undue delay. However, we accept no responsibility for email transmission/delivery failures or delays howsoever caused.
• We accept no responsibility whatsoever for the accuracy or completeness of the assumptions and/or projections for which the submitter must assume full responsibility. Projections are supplied "as is" and without any representations or warranties whatsoever.
• Reports cannot be tailored to handle individual requirements and we are under no obligation to respond to follow-on queries etc. from submitters.
• We accept assumptions for only one business per submitter or only one client in the case of submissions from professional advisers etc. However, we permit up to two sets of assumptions per business. These could relate to (a) two scenarios for the same business or (b) represent initial assumptions followed by revised assumptions altered in the light of projections generated by initial assumptions.
• We place no restrictions on the use of projections by submitters but we would be very grateful for an acknowledgment of PlanWare as their source i.e. <http://www.planware.org/>.
• All rights are reserved. Specifically, we reserve the right not to process applications, without offering any reasons.
• Submitters must accept full responsibility for the confidentially of data during its transmission to/from us over the Internet. Once received, PlanWare will treat a submitter's data as strictly confidential and, under no circumstances, will it be disclosed to any parties other than to the submitter's email address. We reserve the right to publish anonymous data which has been aggregated by broad sector, location etc.
• Our Privacy & Security Statement applies.
• Use of the service signifies acceptance of these terms and conditions.

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