How to make a financial plan?

HOW TO CREATE A STEP-BY-STEP FINANCIAL PLAN

We won't kid you that creating a financial plan is something you can do in one evening. But if you know how to put one together, you'll save yourself a lot of work and avoid a lot of worry.

Make sure your financial plan is comprehensive and connected. It is very important that your financial plan is based on real data, is accurate and respects all possible market constraints. At the same time, it should be sufficiently variable. Unfortunately, there really is no room for fairy tales here. A financial plan, even though it may not look like it, should be clear and easy to understand for everyone! Remember to update your financial plan regularly and make sure that no section is left out or incomplete.

1. Define what you are selling

Before you start creating your financial plan, you should clearly define exactly what you will be offering to customers in your café. You may already have some ideas in your head. Now is the time to put them on paper.

2. Calculate all your costs

We've already talked about costs today. We recommend that you break your costs down into categories so that you can more easily navigate them later. First, write down your direct costs. In your case, this will be, for example, café equipment and raw materials. Then think about what you need to provide for these direct costs. This will probably include items such as rent, utilities, legal help, accountants, tax advisors, etc.

Once you have all the costs quantified, be sure to add a reasonable margin - it is recommended to add 5-20% of the total cost.

3. Calculate your business and marketing strategy

How best to promote your café will be discussed later in a separate article. For now, expect some promotion to be part of your costs. After all, without promotion, no one will discover your café. And with the amount of work and money spent so far, it would be quite a pity, don't you think? Paid promotion, if properly targeted, doesn't have to be as expensive as it may seem at first glance.

4. What price tag will you put on your merchandise?

We have a separate article on pricing for you, so let's keep it short. You need to set the price in a way that fits your chosen business and marketing strategy and is acceptable to your target customer group. Often the key is not necessarily a large number of products sold, but the optimal number at the optimal price.

5. Calculate sales

With sales, you need to look not just at an absolute number, but at a number of factors such as the growth in sales from week to week or month to month, the breakdown of sales by customer segment, the average size of sales in a given customer segment and other indicators. You shouldn't settle for just a final number. Try to understand its causes as well.

6. Complete the financial statements

There are three basic outputs of a financial plan:

• Balance sheet
• Profit and loss statement (income statement)
• Cash flow (cash flow)

BALANCE SHEET OF THE COMPANY

The balance sheet of the business gives you an overview of your café's financial resources at a certain point in time - i.e. the result of your business efforts. The balance sheet shows all the assets on the asset side and the financial position on the liability side.

The asset side shows what the business owns and the liability side shows what debts it has. In addition to liabilities, equity is also shown on the liabilities side. Remember that assets and liabilities should always be equal in terms of value.

COSTS AND INCOME OF THE ENTERPRISE

Your costs represent the wear and tear or consumption of your assets in monetary terms - i.e. the equipment that wears out each day, or the coffee you will consume each day. Costs reduce profit or loss, but they also reduce tax liability if they are tax deductible.

Your costs will include:

• Purchases consumed (materials, raw materials),
• services, i.e. external outputs (energy consumption, repairs),
• personnel costs (wages, remuneration, statutory insurance),
• taxes and charges (income tax, property tax),
• depreciation of fixed assets, provisions,
• other operating costs,
• finance costs,
• extraordinary costs.

Revenue is a somewhat more pleasant matter. These are the amounts of money that your café earns through its activities, regardless of whether actual reimbursement has occurred at the same time. Of course, beware! Revenue and income are not exactly the same thing. Revenues, in contrast to income, are the actual cash flows for the activities carried out by your business.

THE CASH FLOW OF A BUSINESS

Essentially all activities of your business that are aimed at building, expanding or otherwise materially changing it will at some point affect its finances. Every purchase or sale your business makes will result in a movement, either up or down, in your accounts.

It is imperative that, as a business, you record all of your business's income and expenses on your cash-flow statement. This statement is also commonly referred to as a cash flow statement or liquidity statement. This is an extremely important assessment because it is the one that can help you determine how stable the excess of financial resources over the financial needs of the business is.

7. Create three scenarios

Using these inputs, you should create three scenarios - a pessimistic, a realistic and an optimistic scenario. The plan you have created so far is based on realistic numbers. Now think about where these numbers might shift under different scenarios. Then add the pessimistic and optimistic scenarios to your financial model and see how the results change in terms of sales, profit and cash flow. This will give you an idea of how much the imaginary scissors of your café can open up.

8. Highlight the essentials at the end

If you want to present the plan to investors or other employees, you should summarise the most important points in a clear conclusion. Any such summary should include simplified financial statements, a summary of the most important variables and financial indicators (e.g. sales growth or sales margin). Use charts and other visual elements to help.

9. Decide how you will finance your café

Once you know the amount needed to fund your café, you should decide what funding sources you will use. This could be your own saved money or money from family, friends or people who like your idea. Of course, you can also opt for a conventional loan from a bank.