Business Finance Planning with Microsoft® Excel® shows how to visualize, plan, and put into motion an idea for creating a start-up company. Microsoft Excel is a tool that makes it easier to build a business financial planning process for a new business venture.

With an easy-to follow structure, the book flows as a six-step process:

1. Presenting a case study of a business start-up
2. Creating goals and objectives
3. Determining expenses from those goals and objectives,
4. Estimating potential sales revenue based on what competitors charge their customers
5. Predicting marketing costs
6. Finalizing the financial analysis with a of financial statements.

Written around an IT startup case study, the book presents a host of Excel worksheets describing the case study along with accompanying blank forms. Readers can use these forms in their own businesses, so they can build parts of their own business plans as they go. This is intended to be a practical guide that teaches and demonstrates by example, in the end presenting a usable financial model to build and tweak a financial plan with a set of customizable Excel worksheets. The book uses practical techniques to help with the planning processing. These include applying a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) matrix to evaluate a business idea and SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) objectives to link together goals. As the book concludes, readers will be able to develop their own income statement, balance sheet, and the cash-flow statement for a full analysis of their new business ideas.

Worksheets are available to download from: https://github.com/gjtpowell/business_finance_planning