How to Create a Financial Forecast for Your Startup Business Plan

In short, financial forecasting is used by businesses to estimate financial performance over a given period, often longer than a year. For existing businesses, financial forecast is based on current historical performance and tries to forecast where the business will be in the next 2, 3 or 5 years. The most fundamental form of a financial model is the Three Statement Model, which includes an interconnected balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement. Costs of sales (COS) are the costs directly related to a product or service, and they represent the cost of producing revenue. Product costs will include raw materials, labor, production equipment depreciation, etc.

Even for the most talented founder, it can be difficult to manage a startup’s financial health singlehandedly. Unfortunately, hiring a team of financial professionals, or even just a Chief Financial Officer, can be an extremely expensive investment. It requires a bit of a mindset shift, but when you stop looking at your financial projection as just a collection of documents and more of a tool to plan growth, it becomes much more useful. Instead of creating projections once and just sticking to it, you can update your projections in real time and see where you stand in the coming months.

How to Create Financial Projections for Startups

You will benefit from the experience of someone who understands very well finance, financial modelling, and more generally the requirements of good financial forecasts when raising capital. Still, apart from being the most expensive option, relying on an expert can easily bring problems. It can be worthwhile to create several scenarios of a financial model (worst vs. base vs. best case) and to check for common pitfalls in financial modeling for startups.

Financial projections typically include projections of income, expenses, cash flow, and balance sheet items. Startups create financial projections in the form of a “Pro Forma Income Statement” — which simply means a financial forecast. Early-stage startups are still building their financial models with assumptions, forecasting everything from sales revenue to marketing costs to a basic cash flow projection.

What to Include in Your Financial Projection

And the business performance for startups can be much more volatile, making it possible for long-term projections to become irrelevant quickly. One of the most common examples of financial forecasting is sales, or revenue, projections. Early stage startups, from pre-seed to seed, can often rely on 3-year forecasts instead.

• However, if your numbers are overly optimistic, it can come back to bite you if you don’t deliver.
• Well, when you focus only on costs and revenues and not on the timing of receiving and sending payments you could end up in serious trouble.
• Keyword tools give you insights in the search volumes for keywords that relate to your offering.
• Financial projections paint a picture of your company’s financial performance today and in the future.

Don’t worry, pre-seed and seed investors don’t necessarily look for businesses turning profits early on. The answer, as you would have guessed it, depends on the objective of the financial forecasts. Whilst forecasting 5-year is often the most appropriate, 3-year or even shorter financial forecasts work very well in certain cases. Ready to invest in a CRM to help you increase sales and connect with your customers? HubSpot for Startups offers sales, marketing, and service software solutions that scale with your startup. Launching a startup or new product line requires a significant amount of capital upfront.

Step 1: Gather Your Data

Another interesting option is altering product prices to analyze the effects on all the lines of the forecast and detect possible efficiencies. Nurture and grow your business with customer relationship management software. You assume it will stay the same, but you want to make sure you can still be profitable in case growth slows down.

• A financial projection uses existing revenue and expense data to estimate future cash flow in and out of the business with a month-to-month breakdown.
• A balance sheet projection is also handy to have for your own purposes, as well, particularly as you grow.
• From these examples you can notice that all of these costs have to be incurred in order to produce the good or deliver the service.
• There are different ways of raising money for your startup and these can be categorized into two main categories.
• Our financial planning software for startups includes different types of COGS forecasting.
• I would say most tech businesses do not fall into a capacity-based projection approach.

When the business is just beginning, concrete information is rarely available, so it’s important to understand how to make the initial forecasts as useful as possible. Business owners should use forecasts as a guideline to identify key trends in the business when compared to actual results, even if financial forecasting for startups the numbers don’t line up exactly. The information will always contain insight on which financial lines are increasing or decreasing and at what pace. In turn, this allows for identifying areas where more focus is needed, and weak spots in the business model can be detected before they snowball.

Greater company appeal to attract investors

Mature businesses have more historical data to inform financial projections. They’re also more likely to have more stable growth patterns, which makes it more feasible to project business performance for multiple years. Forecasts provide projections about your future financial performance for a given time period.

It is a dynamic tool that you need to update and revise regularly based on your actual performance and changing conditions. You should compare your forecast with your actual results and analyze the variances and trends. You should also review your assumptions and drivers and adjust them if necessary. Updating and revising your forecast helps you track your progress, identify gaps and opportunities, and make informed decisions. Cash flow problems helped kill just under 30% of startups, 18% had pricing and cost issues, and 17% were effectively flying by the seat of their figurative pants by selling products without a business model.