Excel Business Plan Template (Table of Contents)
Introduction to Business Plan Template
A Business plan is a blueprint resource that helps in improving their revenue and cover all their goals. Every business needs planning before their step forward. Else, it may lead to expensive measures later on. They help in business jump as well as raising high capital. These templates are found in Office applications like Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Some Business plan templates are pre-installed, while some are available from third-party sources, which can be imported to Excel, Word, and Powerpoint. It will make the report more professional and interactive for the business. For example, if a company needs a sales plan for their business, then the Business plan template will be designed accordingly.
Example:
We can see the estimated costs of different items and the total estimated costs in the above template. Basically, it is the investment or the start-up budget. This will help in analyzing the revenue of the company.
Explanation:
The business plan template not only consists of an estimated budget. It may also consist of estimated sales and profit as well. Profits and sales may vary afterwards, but it will give a blueprint on how the business will perform. Every business has its own business plan before the launch of a product or a new business. Mostly, business plans are used by either the Board of Directors or any organisation’s top management. Often, these plans are spread down through the organization hierarchy. But how these plans are made? There are some templates which make these plan clearer and visual ready. Manually creating the template may take some time, but some common use templates are pre-installed in the office suite, and some third-party templates can be imported from various sources. Below are the steps on how to use a business plan template.
How to Create a Business Plan Template in Excel?
- MS Excel some inbuilt Business plan templates in it. We can use the same or modify it as per our need. If those are not useful, we can import templates from an outside source. After opening Excel, we have to select a workbook. We can select more templates, as shown below.
- A window opens with some templates below and a search bar on the top.
- Now, if we don’t use the template from below, we can search the template from the search bar. We’ll type “Business plan” and then can see the result.
Some templates can be seen above. We can select the template as per our needs.
- To open a third party template, we can just click on Open > Browse and select the template we have downloaded from a source.
- Let us suppose we have selected a business template from the inbuilt templates.
- We’ll click on “create” to make ready the template.
- Now, the template is ready for use. We can see that there are two types of template, i.e. “Cost plans” and “Profit & Loss” templates, as shown below.
- Now, we can add some formatting and modify it as per our business or needs. Let us try this in the “Cost plan” template first.
We have changed the backgrounds and the estimated costs of items/services of an organization. We can add or delete columns and rows as per our needs. There are months, costs per month, one-time cost, and total cost as columns.
- Total cost per item is calculated as “Cost per month * Months + One-time cost”. Finally, we can apply the sum function in the “Total cost” column to find the estimated budget of the company.
- Since we have our estimated costs, we will also have the profit and loss as per our investment rate as well which can be calculated in the 2nd
First of all, let us work on the “Revenue” section. There are 12 months of revenue details, and the net sales, cost of goods sold, and profit is calculated. Net sales are calculated by totaling the sum of all the revenues. Similarly, YTD or Year to End sales is calculated by totaling all the month’s revenue.
- When we place the cursor on “Net sales”, we can see a drop-down list which shows many parameters like sum, avg, count, etc.
When we click on the respective function, it will show the result accordingly. But how it works? This template has in built functions in the drop-down list. If not present, we can add it manually.
- Now, the Cost of goods sold is shown, which is calculated with the formula “Estimated sales * 0.4”. For October, the cost of goods sold is 1000*0.4, i.e. 400$.
- Gross profit is calculated with the formula as shown below.
The formula says, “Net sales-Cost of goods sold=Gross profit”. Similarly, we can calculate the gross profit every month. And the total gross profit can be calculated by totaling the profits of all the months.
- Now in the “Expense” section, salaries, marketing costs, commission, rent, and other costs are to be mentioned.
Total expenses can be calculated by totaling all the expenses.
- Income before taxes is calculated as follows: It is basically the income excluding taxes. Now when taxes are imposed, net income will be Income-Tax.
- Similarly, Net income for YTD can be calculated as per the YTD, or we just can sum the incomes of all three months.
Things to Remember
- Estimated costs and actual costs may differ.
- Similarly, estimated revenue and actual revenue may be different also.
- The business plan model is a blueprint of actual revenue and profits.
- Templates can be used from inbuilt ones or can be imported from outside sources as well.
- We should be aware of all the formulas before we create a Business plan sheet.
- Normally, top management authorities and board members use these sheets.
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