Start with the numbers, then write

The usual way to write a business plan is to write the text and add the numbers at the end. It feels natural: you know your idea, you can tell its story, and the spreadsheet is a chore. It is also how plans end up saying one thing in the summary and another in the forecast.

Business Plan reverses the order. The forecast comes first, and the text quotes it.

What goes wrong the usual way#

A revenue figure in the executive summary is typed by hand. Six weeks later the forecast changes, the summary does not, and nobody notices until a banker does. A paragraph says the business is profitable in the first year, and the cash flow table shows a loss. A cash dip in month seven is not mentioned anywhere, because nobody looked at the month-end balance.

What the forecast gives you first#

When you answer the intake, the app picks a starting forecast and runs it: a monthly profit and loss, a cash flow, a balance sheet and a handful of key figures, in whole cents so that the balance sheet balances exactly. You see break-even, the month with the lowest cash and how much you would have to raise. These are the things a lender reads first, and now you read them first too.

Then the text#

Every section starts with a draft whose figures are placeholders, such as the revenue of year one. When the plan is printed, the placeholder becomes the model's figure. If you change your price, the number in every sentence that mentions revenue changes with it, and a sentence cannot say a number the model does not have.

Why it is worth the discipline#

You write fewer wrong sentences. You find out about the cash dip while it is still a plan. You can defend each figure, because each one points at a cell with a name, a value and a flag that says whether you confirmed it. When a banker asks where a number comes from, you have an answer.

What it will not do#

It does not make your assumptions right. A forecast is only as good as its inputs, which is why every cell the template cannot know is marked until you confirm it. It also does not replace an advisor: the app is orientation, not advice.

See how the forecast works, or the truth guard.