Business Plan Help

Cash Flow Calculator

This cash calculator shows you how business-to-business sales, carrying inventory, and rapid growth can absorb a business' money. Click here for the cash flow calculators or here for more calculators.

12-Month Cash-Flow Forecast Spreadsheet – Free Download

The National Federation of Enterprise Agency’s Small Business Advice website provides a 12-month cash-flow forecast spreadsheet that you can download for free. It’s a lot safer and easier to use a proven cash-flow model rather than setting up your own cash-flow forecast from scratch. Another benefit of using this model is that it allows you to measure your 'Actuals' against your 'Forecasts' – something every good business plan should do. There's also a Profit & Loss forecast spreadsheet that you can download free.

Simple Cash-Flow Forecast Model – Free Download

Portobello Business Centre provides a simple profit & loss cash-flow forecast model that you can download for free from their website. Their cash-flow forecast covers the first 12 months of trading and you can also use it to calculate a basic break-even analysis for your business plan. They also provide a downloadable business plan template for a new business. The sample start-up business plan gives you a detailed business plan structure and contains good advice on writing your business plan.

A Free Cash-Flow Forecast Template for Your Business Plan

Chamber Business Enterprises provides a free template you can use to produce a simple cash-flow forecast for your business plan. You can download the MS Excel spreadsheet in seconds and quickly enter your figures into the template to produce your own cash-flow forecast. This cash-flow forecast template is suitable if you’re writing a business plan for a new business start-up or a small business.

Produce Financial Forecasts for Your Business Plan

Putting together your own cash-flow, profit & loss and balance sheet for your business plan can be a time-consuming and complex task. DO$H Software provides a range of solutions specifically designed for sole traders and small businesses. You can download a free trial of each software package from their website - to see whether it produces the figures you need for your business plan - before you part with any cash.

Quick Start Business Plan and Forecasting Tools

The Microsoft bCentral website gives you a Quick Start Business Plan. The free, downloadable, financial forecasting tools provided include: Profit forecast, Cashflow forecast, and Break-even analysis. They suggest that the tools will help to evaluate how financially viable your business idea is, but you’ll need more detailed tools such as Palo Alto’s Business Plan Pro to produce a full business plan.

Free Financial Planning Downloads from the NFEA

The Business Planning section of the National Federation of Enterprise Agency (NFEA) site has two financial spreadsheets available for you to download. There’s one for a profit & loss and one for a cashflow forecast. Don’t forget to download a very handy set of ‘User instructions’.

Free Financial Forecasting Spreadsheets

The Innovateur website provides a range of financial forecasting spreadsheets you can download for free. The financial plan templates will help you produce a full set of financial statements for your business plan without the need for accountancy expertise. The spreadsheet models available to download are; Financial Plan (includes Profit & Loss, Cashflow and Balance Sheet), Quick Break-Even & Pricing Analysis and Full Break-Even analysis.

Cashflow Wizard - Financial Forecasts Models

Cashflow Wizard models are customised Excel models and have all the information you need to produce detailed financial forecasts for your business plan. You can use Cashflow Wizard to produce your Profit and Loss, Balance sheet and Cashflow forecasts and give you over 20 pages of useful charts and management ratios that are ready to print for your business plan. Prices range form £49 for ‘Quick & Dirty’ to £250 for ‘Tailor Made’. You can download a free evaluation model from their website.