Here, you forecast the revenues of the company. 

The template has no logic behind the revenues, so you can add your assumptions to the assumption page and make the related calculations on the calculation sheet. Please make sure you link the values to the correct files in the Statement. 

ReneOffice.Solution Example: 

Assumption Sheet: 

• Define three products 
• Define product prices by year 
• Define sales volume by year

Calculation Sheet: 

• Link Price per Products 
• Link Sales Volume 
• Calculate Revenue (Price * Volume)

Here, you forecast the related cost of your services or product sales. 

You can do this as a revenue percentage or based on fixed volume and costs. This mainly depends on how you generate revenue. 

ReneOffice.Solution Example: 

Assumption Sheet: 

• Define purchase cost per unit 
• Define shipping cost per unit

Calculation Sheet: 

• Link Sales Volume from Revenue 
• Link Purchase cost per Unit 
• Link Shipping cost per unit 
• Calculate Purchase Cost (Cost & Volume) 
• Calculate Shipping Cost (Cost & Volume) 

Opex in a basic 5-year financial plan is pretty simple, as these are usually fixed costs; we enter our expected values. I want to make the staff and marketing expenses more detailed. This can provide partners/investors with valuable information on how we want to grow and how we want to reach our clients. 

Just so you know, how many lines of operating expenses you want to show is up to you. But I would focus on the essential parts and summarise the rest under “others”. 

ReneOffice.Solution Example: 

Assumption Sheet: 

• Staff expense by department and year 
• Marketing expense by marketing channel and year
• Other operating expenses by year

Calculation Sheet: 

• Sum of Staff Expenses 
• Sum of Marketing expenses 
• Sum of Other Opex expenses 

I provided you with a basic capex model, which summarises all the capital expenditures into one value per year and comes with a straight-line depreciation. 

In reality, assets such as computers, warehouse equipment or production tooling would all have different depreciation schedules. I also got templates for that, but we simplified it into an overall value in this case. 

ReneOffice.Solution Example: 

Assumption Sheet: 

• Enter the useful life of the assets, which means over how many years will the depreciation be calculated 
• Enter the investment values per year. 

Calculation sheet: 

• There are no changes; use the basic model. 

With this schedule, we forecast the outstanding balances and inventory balances.

We usually get paid within a few days or weeks after making the sale. It takes time until the credit card transactions come into our bank account. On the other hand, we also have bills, which we have to pay within a few weeks.

We, therefore, enter the “days” of the payment terms to estimate the values.

In the case of the inventory, we say how many days a product is in our warehouse.

These values are highly speculative for an annual model and give us a rough estimation. Unfortunately, a yearly model needs to reflect better the initial cash investments into inventory. So, the cash balances need to be used carefully.

For more detailed estimates, I recommend using a monthly financial plan. However, this type of forecast is sufficient for the initial evaluation of a business idea.

Example ReneOffice.Solutions

• Accounts Receivable range from 30-40 days
• Accounts Payable range from 40-50 days
• Inventory Turnover, from 100-80 days

The template includes a basic debt schedule, which is based on flexible debt issuance and repayment schedule. 

We define the annual interest rate, which is applied to the average debt outstanding. 

Next, we forecast the debt needed to finance the operations each year. 

If we pay back debt, we enter a negative value. 

I recommend doing the debt and equity schedule as the last step. The cash balance in the cash flow statement can not be negative. 

Example ReneOffice.Solutions

• Entered new credits for the first two years
• Repayment starts when the operations are positive, in this case, years 4 and 5. 

For this template, I used a basic tax forecasting method. If the company is profitable, then a tax rate applies. This does not consider any forward-carried losses or tax refunds.