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The easy answer is:
The longer harder answer is this:
It depends on multiple factors including your knowledge base, your skills and abilities, your business’s complexity, and the amount of time you have to dedicate to the plan among others.
First off, the narrative (written) portion of the business plan is a commodity. You can go out on the internet right now and find thousands of templates, outlines, fill in the blank models, etc that would probably be a good place to start. A business plan program takes it one step further…it formats the plan for you and allows you to customize your plan to fit your needs. You might spend hours of you time just getting the formatting correct if you pull a template off a website.
Now would be a good time to address sample business plans. There are some good uses for sample business plans and some inappropriate uses for them. Reading a sample plan can give you a good idea of the type, breadth and depth of information that might be contained in a plan for your industry. To this end, reading a plan to get ideas for the type of information typically found in a plan is a good exercise…particularly if you have never written a plan before.
A bad use would be to copy the sample plan’s data and insert your business name and relevant information. Boiler plate business plan will be seen for what they are; an attempt to pass off someone else’s work as your own. People in the industry can spot a business plan that was written off a sample plan from a mile away and these plan are not given much credence. You would not be doing yourself any favors by copying a sample plan because:
1. In almost all cases the market data will not be relevant to your market causing you to inaccurately forecast sales.
2. Operations and therefore expenses vary drastically from business to business even within the same industry.
3. You would be basing your venture on a document that has been seen by thousands of other people. If it was that great of an idea why would it be out there for free?
4. You miss out on most of the benefits of writing a plan including opportunity discovery and strategic planning.
The final part of the business plan is that financial projections. This is where business plan programs really provide value. The ability to produce accurate and relevant financial projections with out spending months programming the intricate interplay between the income statement, balance sheet and cash flow is the main reason to buy business planning software. Even highly trained professionals with years of experience in spreadsheets and accounting principles would require hundreds or thousands of hours to program a three year financial projection. With a business plan program that process takes between one and six hours depending on your level of experience and education.
Ease of use is key when looking at financial projection program. We have found that the business plan programs that use excel for their financial modeling (BizPlan Builder and PlanWrite) are the most advanced but are also by far the most complex. The ones that built their own system to input data piece by piece (Business Plan Pro and Ultimate Business Planner) are easiest to use but still offer enough flexibility for most users needs.
So is a business plan program a good investment for you? If you need financial projections the answer is most probably “Yes”.
But, first read our reviews and try our free planning software to find out today.
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