Be pro inBudgeting & financial forecasting
Run your business successfully with a financial model and financial forecast that truly maps your business.
Get in touchRun your business successfully with a financial model and financial forecast that truly maps your business.
Get in touchWith financial modelling and financial forecasting, you transform your business plan into numbers. We provide you with a financial model tailored to your business, including the monthly three financial statements profit and loss, cash flow and balance sheet, enriched with KPIs relevant to your industry and stage.
The model simulates your marketing and sales funnel, shows your current and future profitability and the funding required to break even. Our team has built hundreds of financial models for startups and large companies, so you get a financial model and forecast like only the pros know.
With a model that links the income statement, cash flow statement and balance sheet, you quickly get a comprehensive understanding of your business finances.
Instead of just making million-dollar revenue projections, our financial model shows you what you and your team need to do operationally to reach those goals in terms of lead generation, conversions, number of customers and pricing.
With a detailed budget for the next 24 months, you have all revenue- and expenditure-related items and targets at hand to define your financing needs.
With our financial model you can easily perform scenario and sensitivity analysis by changing assumptions such as time of market entry, conversion rates, annual contract value and product development expenses.
Our model will show you the KPIs that matter to your industry and stage of business such as customer lifetime value and customer acquisition costs.
The assumptions in your financial model are reviewed and compared with those of other companies to make them robust and reliable, so you get a financial forecast that adds value.
Our process of creating a valuable financial model for budgeting and forecasting involves nine steps, which are summarized below.
Simply enhance, e.g. further financial statements and KPIs
Learn moreModel check, validation and benchmarking
Learn moreFrom scratch, including validation and benchmarking
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A financial model is a management steering tool that lets you simulate your business case and create scenarios based on assumptions concerning income and expenses. A good financial model will quickly let you know what needs to be achieved financially and how much financing is required each month to successfully run your business.
Financial forecasting is a projection of your business into the future. The forecast serves you as a budget and long-term outlook to manage your company.
Every business should have at least a simple financial model to see and check under what conditions a business idea should and can be pursued.
A financial model can fulfil different tasks. Therefore, there are different types of models. However, what all models have in common is that they should consist of the three financial statements, namely the income statement, the cash flow statement and the balance sheet statement, in order to fully reflect a business. Such a model can then be extended to serve a specific purpose, e.g. forecasting a business case, simulating a merger and acquisition, valuing share options and so on.
The accuracy of a financial forecast should increase over the life cycle of a business. At the beginning, a forecast with some basic assumptions about income and expenses is sufficient to validate your business idea. As your business grows, the financial forecast should become more detailed and accurate, as the assumptions can then also be better validated.
Performance targets should be linked to specific operational metrics such as the number of clients won and served. Linking key performance indicators allows you to set ambitious yet realistic performance targets.
The minimum acceptable forecast accuracy depends on the life cycle of your business. For a young start-up company, a forecast accuracy at the level of turnover and profit of +/- 20 % over 12 months is really good. For a more mature company, the forecast accuracy should go down to +/-5 % not taking into account unexpected external events.
At the beginning, the purpose of the financial forecast has to be defined, followed by the structure, the required level of detail and the number of assumptions to be considered. Sensitivity and scenario analyses help to understand the drivers of the business before selecting the most appropriate scenario for the purpose and addressee initially defined.
Financial forecasting and planning estimates your future earning power, taking into account all income and expenses. Financial planning shows how much money is needed and whether your business will be able to eventually generate a profit and a positive return on investment for the business owners and investors over a specific period of time.
Budgeting is a detailed financial forecast over a period of 12 to 24 months showing the financial objectives for all functions and departments.
The financial forecast is an output of a financial model. The financial model itself enables the financial planner to play with assumptions to generate different financial scenarios.
The financial forecast sets the financial goals for the founders of a start-up in terms of generating income and expenses. A solid financial forecast also shows how much funding a start-up will need before it reaches break-even.
The advantages of financial forecasting are that it provides guidance to management, shows a likely business trend and the underlying value drivers. The disadvantage is that reliable financial forecasting requires a lot of expertise to be done properly. Therefore, it can be costly and time-consuming.
This depends very much on the organisational structure of a company. Usually, the CEO is responsible for the financial forecast. However, he is ideally supported by the chief financial officer and the board of directors in preparing a reliable financial forecast.
There are different types of financial forecasting tools. The most common tools are spreadsheet programmes such as Excel and Google Sheets. Recently, software companies have also emerged to help entrepreneurs make financial forecasts without prior knowledge and expertise. However, this can also be dangerous as the underlying assumptions still need to be understood.
Tools like Planful can be helpful, but should be operated by an expert who understands all the calculations behind them to mitigate the risk of unrealistic assumptions and forecasts. Especially because such tools often only provide financial results without any link to operational metrics. This drastically reduces the usability and value of such tools.