Essentials Business Plan Workbook Spreadsheet Template for Google Sheets & Excel

Revenue sources projected across three years, totalled. More than one revenue line is what makes a plan answerable when someone asks where the growth comes from. A single revenue line growing forty percent a year is an assertion; a line per source, each with its own trajectory, is a plan - and the difference is visible to anyone reading it.

Cost categories on the same three years, totalled the same way. Giving costs a sheet of their own rather than a section is what stops them being an afterthought. It also means every figure in this workbook is a positive number - the sheets do the separating rather than the sign, which is a smaller thing to get wrong than the free build's convention.

Total revenue and total expenses read from the two sheets before it, the net profit derived from them, and a profit margin for each year. Nothing here is typed, which is the point: the summary cannot drift from the sheets it summarises. Change a revenue line and this sheet moves. The margin row is the one worth reading across. A plan where revenue triples and the margin does not move is describing a business that has to work three times as hard for the same proportion, and that is a different plan from one where the margin widens - even though both show the same net at the end. A one-time start-up costs figure sits beneath the summary, entered once. It is what the dashboard's break-even month is measured against.

The first year across the top - projected income, projected operating costs and the difference between them - and beneath it the same plan taken over its full span: revenue across the three years, profit across the three years, and the month the start-up costs are paid back by cumulative profit. Setting year one against the three-year figure is the reading that matters, because a plan whose first year is thin and whose third carries it is a different proposition from one that earns steadily. The break-even month checks all three years in turn rather than stopping at twelve, so a plan that pays back in year two or three still gets a month rather than a guess. Two charts read the sheets beneath: revenue against expenses over the three years, and net profit by year.