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| Another example estimating start-up costs | |||
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Question:
I have struggled with the following:
I registered the company in my county in January. I have been doing research in the meantime. I have purchased a computer, a truck and misc. office supplies. I need to borrow $100,000. I have additional cash that I would be willing to put in. I will be manufacturing units that will cost me $22,000 to build and sale them directly to the consumer for $48,000.
My questions are as follows:
Do I use the existing or start-up plan?
Where is the correct place to input what I have already invested?
Where do I input the cash that I would put in?
The first month (May 1999) I want to build the first two prototypes, expecting the first unit sale to be in June.
Should I show inventory? (It seems complicated since after the first prototype I will not build a unit until I have an order.)
Thanks for your help!
I am using Business Plan Pro to prepare a small business plan.
Answer:
A start-up company gets a table for start-up costs, which appears in your Table menu. If you don't have it, go back to the Plan Wizard command in the File menu, and find that question and change your answer. It won't hurt to do that midstream, after your plan is started.
Once you're set as start-up, you'll see the start-up table with cells already waiting for entering the initial assets, money already spent, etc. There is also a Startup Funding table with cells already set for your own investment and your initial loans as well.
With your inventory, as long as you have version 2003 of Business Plan Pro or later you can just type in your inventory amounts for each month. If you have an earlier version, the formulas for estimating won't work well with individual units like in your case, which is why we put an override option into those earlier versions. Use your help and instructions to find the override, if you don't have 2003 or later, so you can type balances in directly.
With those specific questions answered, I'd like to guide you to where the help facilities are, now that it won't seem like I'm just too lazy to answer the questions. We put a lot of effort into making this product easy to use and understand, so I want to make sure you know where you can find this kind of answer.
First, please go to any table and while looking at the table make sure you have wizard instructions showing. The wizard instructions should appear just above the table. With the instructions showing, you have single clicks to examples, Table Help, and the table wizards. Those texts are full of details (for example, what's personnel burden) even to the extent of specific row-by-row help for each row in the table. If you don't know how to use the row-by-row help, look in your help index for "row-by-row" and you'll find instructions.
Second, make sure you read through the Business Plan Pro manual, Chapter 6, about the start-up table. The manual goes into detail, so if you really want to know what's going on, you have to read it. It is built into your software as a digitized book, to view this book click Help and select Contents.
Third, Press F1 at any time while running Business Plan Pro to get to the automatic context-sensitive help, which includes details on tables, and a glossary.
Fourth, there is a 300+ page book on business planning that goes along with Business Plan Pro, which explains everything in great detail. It has an index and a glossary, and "personnel burden," for example, is in both. It is built into your software, like the manual, as a digitized book.
Tim Berry
