business of software book

Oct 13
2009

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business of software book
business plans for a book publisher?

The financials are killing me mentally. Everything else is done except for that part and I have the Business Plan Pro software but it’s just as confusing even when I use the Hurdle Book that comes with it. Any suggestions?

Hi – I work for Palo Alto Software, makers of Business Plan Pro, and I would be happy to help you.

The best way to approach the financials is to take it step by step. I would start with the Sales Forecast and begin by forecasting your expected sales for your first 12 months. If you choose to use the “units-based” sales forecast, you are going to forecast the number of items you plan to sell each month and then give each item a price that you expect to sell it for. This is the “unit price.” Business Plan Pro will automatically multiply the number of units you plan to sell by the price to determine your total sales.

The next step is to determine your “cost of goods.” This is essentially what it costs you to produce the item that you are selling.

To simplify the entire sales forecast, you can choose to do a “values based” forecast. This gets rid of all the discussion around “units” and allows you to simply enter in the total dollar amount of your expected sales each month.

After you have completed your sales forecast, you should move on to the Profit and Loss. The P&L is simply a list of your monthly expenses. Add additional rows to list additional expenses or delete rows that aren’t relevant to your business.

Once you have completed your Sales Forecast and your P&L, you will find that you are well on the way to a complete business plan. Business Plan Pro will automatically complete your Cash Flow and Balance sheet based on your data.

There’s obviously much more to business plan financials than I can explain here, but I think you will find that there is a wealth of information available to help you right in the software. Let me summarize your help options:

1. The Table Wizards can guide you step by step through each financial table. You can access the wizards by clicking on the “table wizard” link in the instructions area for any table.

2. The help files that you can access from the Help menu in the software have detailed explanations of each table as well as a complete financial glossary to help explain financial terms. Use the search feature in Help to find exactly what you are looking for.

3. “row by row” help is available for every single row in every table. Just click on a row and a description of that row will be displayed at the bottom of the table.

4. Finally, we offer free monthly webinars to help you with the software. You can find a schedule of those webinars here:

http://www.paloalto.com/training/

Good luck with your plan and please let me know if you have any specific questions that you would like help with.