Small Business Financial Planning

Financial planning for a business refers to all activities related to planning a company’s revenues and expenses. One of the most essential financial planning tools is the annual budget. However, the business plan, strategy, pricing, and scenario work are also crucial parts of financial planning. If you nww

Careful budgeting and tracking of actualized figures help you stay on top of the financial status of your business and react in time to any changes that may affect it.

The budgeting tool below helps you create and follow up on your annual budget. If you also need support with pricing your products or services, you can try the pricing tool as well. The tools are designed for use with Microsoft Excel, and unfortunately, their functionality cannot be guaranteed in other spreadsheet programs.

The purpose of the pricing tool is to make planning the prices for your products and services easier. With this tool, you can plan a price for up to 20 products or services simultaneously.

In the tool, you can enter the costs you want to be covered by your business revenues, your planned sales volumes, profit target, and time spent working on the business. Based on the figures you enter, the tool calculates product/service-specific prices that, assuming the sales targets are met, would cover your costs and help you achieve your profit goal.

The “Time Management” section of the tool can also be used more broadly for planning your working time as an entrepreneur.

Please note that the prices calculated with the tool are based solely on the user’s input and should not be considered Ornamo’s official price recommendations for design products or services.

Contrary to popular belief, a budget is not meant to be just an “educated guess” of next year’s revenues and expenses. Its goal is to reflect the business’s objectives in monetary terms — in other words, to serve as a kind of an action plan for the year ahead.

The budgeting tool is intended to make preparing and following up on your annual budget easier. In the tool you can enter all costs related to your business as well as the planned sales revenues. The tool then compiles the input into a full budget, allowing you to view both monthly results (profit or loss) and the overall result for the year.

For each income and expense item, you can test different scenarios, such as what would happen to your results if a particular revenue stream dropped by 20% or an expense increased by 10%. This makes it easier to prepare for different situations and create plans for them.

The next step is to enter your actualized financial figures. You can add the realized costs and revenues as they occur, which makes it easy to track how well the budget is being followed and to react to changes in a timely manner.

On the final tab of the tool, you’ll find various charts that present both budgeted and actual figures in a graphical format. These visualizations are intended to help you better understand your business’s financial performance.