Electronic Financial Worksheets from The Planning Shop

Wow, did I discover a useful business planning tool. No affiliation here; I'm just a customer and a fan.

I'm writing a formal business plan, which is no easy task, if you've never done it. So I went to the library and checked out a pile of books on business plan writing. One book distinguished itself from the others pretty quickly, just in its completeness, readability, and usefulness: The Successful Business Plan: Secrets and Strategies by Rhonda Abrams. The book has been invaluable, but it's the Electronic Financial Worksheets that took me through the scariest part of business-plan writing, those ten or twenty pages of financial spreadsheets.

The worksheets are in Excel format, and are brilliantly linked together so that you only need to plug in your actual figures, and the software automagically makes hundreds of calculations instantly and fills them into the proper cells all across the worksheets. Assuming your own figures are good, of course, the result is a set of very professional financial spreadsheets, formatted and ready to print and include with your business plan.

After worrying for a month about getting to this part of the business plan writing process, I was able to get 98% of the financials completed in a few hours yesterday.

Not only that, but when I had a technical problem - one which was entirely my doing - aan email to the support address got me an intelligent and friendly response which completely solved my problem in less than an hour. The help files actually had all the information I needed anyway, but I was just stuck, and having a human being to lend a hand just when I needed was priceless.

WebDevBiz.com is truly not affiliated in any way with the writers or publishers of these materials; my own set of forms for web developers is quite different. I just really appreciate this kind of quality. The price is $27.96, a steal for something so useful. If you're writing a business plan, and you're not a CPA or other experienced financial genius, you might find these as invaluable as I did.