How do others put together business plans.

How do others put together business plans.

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I have recently been awarded a lot of business plans to do and looking at how best to tackle them and wondered what you guys did for them. I always find the numbers are the easy bit either using winforecast or excel but it is all the bumf that goes with them that I usually struggle with. Do you guys use word to formulate the report and drop the financials into it to produce the full pack or do you use something else . I am not the best at design with inserting graphs etc for a professional look so wondered if there is any software that does the job. I have seen things like "business plan pro" and wondered if anyone uses this or could recommend a good alternative that wont break the bank. Would it be worth just putting some time into developing my own master proforma in word and just amending it each time I had to do one. keen to see what others use. Thanks in advance for your comments.

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Glenn Martin
By Glenn Martin
19th Mar 2014 16:44

bad day to post

on Budget day I suspect.

 

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By Sheepy306
11th Apr 2014 19:14

WinForecast and Word
I always used WinForecast for the figures, put them in the appendix and then tailored a standardish plan in Word. I've never had a batch of similar ones to do though, have tended to be adhoc specific ones. Kept it short and simple. Have looked at some software and found it either far too extensive or far too Anerican.

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Man of Kent
By Kent accountant
11th Apr 2014 19:57

SImilar to Sheepy306

A couple of years ago I had 5 or 6 business plans to do in a couple of months. I set up an excel spreadsheet with a linked P&L, Balance Sheet and Cashflow, I also had a word template for the narrative report.

If you expect to do a few I'd suggest you take a similar approach and spend the time to get the set up right.

Agree that the business plan software you can get is OTT and very impersonal.

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Glenn Martin
By Glenn Martin
11th Apr 2014 22:10

I am amazed that
sage are no longer supporting Winforcast and that no one has developed a suitable replacement. I have Windows 8 on my laptop which will run it but it crashes when yu try and run reports to word. It still runs on my PC ok in Win 7. I am doing a lot of care home plans as they need them as part of the contract monitoring requirement. You need one for each home, so I am doing 13 for 1 company so they are 90% identical with just a small amount of personalisation for differing bed numbers.

They looked ok and just did as you suggested above, think I could maybe do with learning a bit more on Word 365 to jazz them up a bit for the end user.

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By petersaxton
12th Apr 2014 05:37

Business Plan Pro

I would use that but ensure it is personalised. 

I always have trouble with the balance sheets.

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