Anyone wanting to become self-employed, has to create a Business Plan to know how much money is needed to start the business and what to do to make it profitable.
In this video we’re going to use Banana 9 to do that, and we’re going to see the several advantages you get compared to the creation of an Excel document.
we first create a new file from an existing template.
In this case we choose "financial planning for a startup" (income and expenses accounting) but we could do the same planning with a double-entry accounting as well.
In the opening popup we change the header name, the opening and closing dates, and the currency in this second step, we customise our template according to our needs as an example, in the accounts table, we put in our machinery account and in the categories table we add our advertising expenses Now we can start creating our financial planning by inserting our budget transactions with expected income and expenses.
First in the budget table we cancel all example transactions, and we insert our actual ones starting with our “start activity” We put in for example: our owner equity deposit on the bank account our received loan the machinery payment and the furniture payment The next transactions we want to enter are our “monthly repetitions”, for this reason in the repeat column we have to choose M.
For a quarterly repetition we should choose 3M for a yearly repetition Y, and so on.
We have now just entered the rent and, as you can see, in the total column the annual total is automatically calculated and displayed.
We then enter the other transactions: here I’ve just entered the salaries of our employees and the system grouped them together under “Personnel expenses” and automatically created all the recurring registrations.
We then enter the expected products sales and the purchase of goods Isn’t that easy? We just have to insert our transactions and repetitions and the software does all the rest we can also make more advanced operations.
for example in our “quarterly repetitions” we enter a 5% Interests on loan and we create a formula to automate this calculation, so we don’t have to change this entry every time we change the loan amount this formula calculates the interest of 5% of the Loan account every quarter, and deducts it from the bank account you can learn more about it and find the most used formulas by downloading the file “financial planning with formulas” we then enter our “annual repetitions” 10% loan reimbursement and we create another formula to calculate it automatically.
Now let’s see what is really important! Namely if our business will be profitable and if we’ll have enough money.
With Banana we can create reports for 1 or more years divided by month, quarter or year.
Watch how fast this procedure is! Let’s start with the quarterly budget for the first year by choosing Account1 -> enhance statement with groups -> Quarterly budget 1st year we type our header, if we want we can add our logo and we simply create our report here on one single page we can find everything we need Under Estate we can see the assets forecast (Bank account, furniture and machinery) and our Liabilities and equity forecast (loan and owner equity) with the budgets for each quarter and the annual budget.
Under Operating result we can find the forecast of our incomes, as well as the evolution of our expenses (Personnel expenses, cost of goods, rent, and so on) And in this row below we can check if our business is profitable, namely if we’re generating profit or loss.
by analysing the current result we can note that our incomes are greater than our expenses.
we are then generating profit and this is good! but we have another problem as we can see from our bank account, in the first quarter we won’t have enough money.
let’s choose the monthly report to obtain more details.
in fact, with the current expected data, in the first three months our bank account is in the red this is a problem that must be solved.
running out of money is something we simply cannot allow.
fortunately the liquidity forecast is already integrated in Banana and we don’t have to create other tables and enter new data which we should do when using Excel.
to have a better view of the cash flow evolution we go to the bank account table.
here we can find the transactions we entered in the bank account and all the recurring transactions that the system has automatically generated.
Banana shows us in this column the progressive balance, which allows us to predict in which period we might have some problems.
A new feature that can further help us with that, are the charts.
These allow us to visually analyse our cash flow, and we can do that for every account and for every category.
in the bank account chart we change the interval in order to have a more detailed vision.
By doing that we can foresee exactly in which periods we will run out of money.
to solve this issue we go back to our budget table and we change, for example, the amount of the loan as you can see the interest and the reimbursement amounts have changed automatically thanks to the formulas we had previously created.
in the bank account table we can now see that our balance is always in the black and the chart here below confirms us that.
let’s go back to our previously generated report We refresh by clicking here, and also in this case we can see that our cash flow issue is now solved.
we are now going to check if our business will be profitable also over a longer period and if we will have enough money.
To create a report over 4 years we can simply click here without creating additional tables or formulas, which we should do when using Excel.
We can also generate a report over a specific time frame by entering a period and a subdivision of your choice.
Let’s check our bank account and our profits.
Everything seems alright! Now our business plan is complete, we can print it out and send it to banks and investors.
easy and fast, right? Let’s go a step further.
When our business will be running, we will have to insert our real transactions and see if everything goes as planned.
Therefore we enter some data in our transactions table.
However, sometimes, something might not go exactly as planned; we could encounter an unexpected instance which we hadn’t previously considered.
For this reason it’s really important to compare what we had previously planned with our current data.
By doing so, we can figure out if possible differences are caused by a wrong estimate of certain expenses or, for example, by an unexpected market response to our product.
We then select the bank account table and in our charts we compare the evolution of the planned cash flow (the budget line) with our current situation (the current line).
This allows us to find any differences immediately without looking at our figures, without wasting time.
Of course we can do the same analysis for every account and for every category.
By doing so, we can easily notice if, for example, our product is having an unexpected success, or if a certain expense is higher than what we had thought.
We can of course also generate a report of this comparison by choosing Account1 -> enhance statement with groups -> Comparison Effective and Budget By creating financial plannings and keeping the accounting with Banana you will always know how your business is going and you will be able to easily find out any differences between budget forecast and actual data.
not only this will help you making more accurate forecasts for the following years, but above all, deciding whether it will be appropriate to take certain measures or important decisions such as expanding the business, hiring new staff or making new investments.
One last important thing: If we realise that our planning doesn’t reflect our actual situation, we can adapt it according to our new condition and create new calculations based on more accurate details.
If, for example, we realise that our goods expenses are too high, we can easily change the corresponding transaction, in order to have the profitability and the cash flow of your company always up-to-date and under control.
As we’ve seen in this video, besides the well known accounting features, Banana offers this new Business Planning tool, which allows anyone to start a new profitable business.
What are you waiting for? Banana is the best investment you can make for your business! Try it for free and without registration! Download it now from the link in the description.
You won't regret it!.
Source: Youtube
