Do you need a solid business plan for requesting a bank loan, pursuing venture or angel capital funding, or simply mapping out a route to recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic? We can help.
This webpage supplies an updated free version of the business planning workbook and instructions from my book, MBAs Guide to Microsoft Excel.
Used by a number of business schools (including top ranked programs like Dartmouth, Norte Dame and Thunderbird), the MBA’s Guide to Microsoft Excel explained how to use Excel for business planning and other tasks. The book also provided a powerful business planning workbook, available as a download from this page, that small business people and entrepreneurs can use to create the income statements, balance sheets, and statements of cash flow needed for a business plan.
Accordingly, if you’re creating pro forma financial statements as part of a business plan, consider buying, downloading and then using the business plan workbook available here. The workbook helps you collects your input variables and then uses those variables to create 36 months of monthly financial statements and 3 years of annual financial statements.
An important note: The downloadable zip file includes both the Excel workbook and also instructions in a .pdf file for using and even customizing the business plan template. And yes, the button you click below says you “purchase and download.” But the price is zero. We stopped charging for this resource during the Covid-19 pandemic.
More Free Business Plan Templates
The free stuff page here at this website, by the way, supplies all of the other Excel workbook templates that were part of the MBA’s Guide to Microsoft Excel. Many of these templates, which you can download for free, can be used with the business planning workbook available for purchase this page. These other workbooks include debt amortization templates, a couple of investment analysis templates, some future value compound interest schedules, a sales and cost-of-goods-sold forecast schedule, and a break-even and profit-volume analysis workbook.
Note: The original business planning template provided in the MBA’s Guide to Microsoft Excel is also available on the free stuff page, but you really shouldn’t use that template. Because the original template is more than ten years old, it doesn’t comply with current generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). The business planning workbook available on this page, however, does comply with GAAP.
Additional Tax Information for Small Businesses
This website provides hundreds, maybe even thousands of pages of free information covering topics like small business and individual taxes, financial and business planning, and general accounting. But I also sell three, modestly priced and instantly downloadable monographs with additional, more specialized information (see descriptions that follow). Each book, by the way, covers tricks and techniques that should easily save a small business or investor thousands of dollars annually.
The most powerful tactic for saving small business taxes? Often, simply arranging your affairs to maximize deductions produces giant annual savings. Read More
Operating or planning to operate your firm as an S corporation? The trick here is setting the right shareholder salary. But finding the sweet spot is tough. Read More
Real estate investment in this tough economy produces pretty good returns. But savvy tax planning can boost your profits by thousands of dollars annually. Read More