Financial plan

Financial Plan.This section includes an MS Word section and an MS Excel section. NOTE: Online financial templates usually lead you astray. Therefore, you may not use them! Build your own Excel® spreadsheets.

· Narrative assumptions or the premises for resource needs. (Note: For some reason, many students forget to include this section. Unfortunately, if you forget to do the narrative assumptions your grade will suffer!) You may bullet point these; in fact, that is typically a better format for assumptions.What is an assumption? It could be the number of units of your product you intend to sell; what price you will sell them for; the revenue growth rate you are assuming; the percentage of the selling price that will represent the COGS; your monthly rent; interest rate on any loan you take; etc. Anything that drives your revenues and expensesthat is not generally known needs to have an assumption attached. That does mean that simple items purchased, such as computers and furniture, do not need assumptions. Only those things that are out of the ordinary or vary considerably need assumptions. Also include in here the legal form your business will take; that will have an impact on the taxes your company will pay (or won’t pay).

· Cash needs assessment (three years of a cash budget, done annually). Include all cash invested in or loaned to the business as well as all of your expenses that must be paid out. When estimating your cash needs, be sure to include all start-up expenses as well as ongoing cash needs until your business can sustain itself. Remember that this will be different from your income statement, since not all cash coming in to the business (such as bank loan money and founder investments) show up on an income statement, and there could be some non-cash expense items on the income statement. Also, if you take a bank loan, only the interest shows up on the income statement; there is also, however, a principal portion of the payment that is a cash outflow.

· Pro-forma income statement (three years, done annually). All expenses must be broken down in detail. You cannot simply list SG&A and report one lump sum, for example.

· And you need to set up data