How to Build a First-Rate Financial Plan for your Next Investor’s Meeting

This template follows a top - down approach, where you can set your revenue target at the end of the third forecast year. Based on your inputs in the respective sheets (like planned headcount, costs and annual contract value) it will calculate the necessary customers you’ll need to acquire in order to achieve your revenue target. Unfortunately, it will never be possible to create a one-size-fits-all template, so feel free to modify whatever you like. Be careful around overly complicated formulas -but feel free to download this template anew in case you broke something and don't know how to fix it. A big thank you to my colleague Erik Hafner for implementing the basic logic and structure.

Together with the Pitch DeckTemplate this will complete your funding round prep package.

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How to use this template

This template contains the following sheets:

·       Intro Guide (also pasted below)

·       Summary: Overview over all key metrics and drivers

·       Assumptions: Reiterate the inputs for the three different scenarios to adapt your plan

·       Sales Pipeline: Fill the leads &customers you already have, to enable more accurate planning

·       Headcount Planning: Fill your current employees and future hiring plan

·       Costs: Consolidated headcount costs(from headcount planning) and monthly expenses

·       Financial Statement: Comprehensive overview over P&L and basic cashflows

Step1: Sales Pipeline

·       Add your current customers to the list (feel free to replace the dummy-leads as you want)

·       Enter the respective lead status

·       Add first contact date (for sales cycle calculation)

·       Add PoC/Trial start date

·       Add PoC/Trial volume

·       Add contract start date

·       Add cancellation date (if applicable)

·       Add annual contract value

·       PoC length and the respective sales cycle are calculated automatically and added to the assumptions as reference

·       Make sure, that the formulas on the right side of your new/existing customer are filled to enable the correct calculation

·       Add your generated leads in the historic period to the sales pipeline in Cells P9 to AA9 to calculate the conversion rate

·       If you don't enter any leads e.g.for 2023, no MRR/additional customers will be planned; you will still get the output of the additional customers needed to reach your ARR target

Step2: Headcount Planning

·       Add the general info of your employees in Cells B47+ to H47+

·       Column B: freely customizable with(code)names of the employees

·       Column C: add the position/titel the employee has; Make sure that the position names are spelled correctly to allow for the correct attribution to the line items

·       To add a new employee simply fill out the pre-filled lines; if you want to add a new line make sure that you doit by dragging down from rows above

·       The Job Title is attributed automatically to the given category in the Headcount Planning and Cost sheet; please double check anyways

·       Column D: Allocate the salary costs to a financial statement line item (only 4 categories available)

·       Column E to I: Add the hiring date,(if applicable) end date, annual gross salary, salary raise percentage and raise date

·       The monthly salary incl. the non-wage labour cost and applicable raises are displayed and calculated automatically for the Headcount Planning and Costs Sheet

·       You can change the categories by right clicking on a tab --> Unhide sheets --> Dropdown Lists

Step3: Costs 

·       Check if your personnel costs from the headcount planning are displayed correctly and every (new) position is attributed to a category

·       Headcount cost values are shown cumulatively for all employees with the same title

·       Add your historic non-personnel costs in cells P45 to AA49

·       You can also just put in the costs for one month and drag / copy & paste them over the 12 months        

·       You can add additional line items as long as you attribute a P&L line item (G&A, COGS, etc.); check the sums afterwards just to make sure

Step4: Assumptions 

4.1 Revenue Assumptions

·       Edit the start date of your forecast, e.g. 01.01.2022

·       This template enables the calculation of your business plan for 3 different cases (low, base & high),fill in your assumption for each of the three scenarios

·       The green values next to the assumptions are based on the inputs you already added and can work as reference

·       Due to the top-down logic, your ARR target at the end of forecast year 3 will be the most important driver, the ARR values at the end of each year should give you a reference

·       Add your sales cycle data

·       Add your annual contract value; forB2B SaaS this could be 1 customer with 25 licenses for 10€/month * 12 months, so 3000€

·       Add your non-recurring revenue info, like overall PoC / Trial length, avg. Volume and percentage of customers doing a trial before a longer-term contract

4.2 Monthly (non-)personnel cost assumptions  

·       Enter the rough amount of non-wage labour costs for your personnel (see comments)    

·       Add your monthly non-personnel spend

4.3 Cashflow

·       Add your cashflow calculation figures

·       DSO: Days Sales Outstanding; How many days does it take on average until your customers pay their bills; if you don't have that info yet, assume 45 days

·       DPO: Days Payables Outstanding:After how many days do you pay your bills? If you don't have that info assume30 days

·       Interest rate on debt: Either you have a specific percentage already or you add your interest payments to the financial statement

·       Tax Rate: Country specific, but with an assumption of 25-30 % you can’t really go wrong

Step5: Financial Statements

·       Scroll down until row 77 to add your planned/unplanned D&A if necessary

·       Add your interest expenses (so far)in row 84; future payments on your outstanding debt will be calculated automatically

·       Add your starting amount of working capital to cells P99-AA102 (your current accounts receivables + short- term assets - accounts payables)

·       Leaving the initial working capital figures empty is okay as well

·       Add your accounts receivables &payables you had through the historical period; future data will be calculated based on your assumption

·       Add your planned issuance of equity and debt (repayments) as absolute values for the respective months in P110 toBK112

Step6: Reiterate & Check the Summary

·       Once you have filled all your info& assumptions check the assumptions sheet once more the see if the entered value make sense and change them if necessary

·       In the summary tab you can select the scenarios (low, base & high) for which you have entered the different values

·       You can customize the charts by selecting the displayed variable via the dropdown in each top left corner of the chart

Step7: Play around, have fun and break stuff -you can always download this template anew!

Disclaimer:This model may still contain errors and lead to wrong or misleading calculations about your business. Wayra does not take any responsibilities for financial damages ensued by using this model! Use this template at your own risk!