Business Planning Blog

Q: Where can I find some useful information on how to write a Business Plan?

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A: It is not easy to write a good business plan without spending a lot of time and money.

There are millions of different web-sites offering all sorts of solutions from simple MS Excel templates (usually between $50 to $150) to almighty Cognos and Hyperion ($20,000-$100,000).

Having sad that there are some free resources available on the internet that can help with this task.

First of all, if you are looking for some general information regarding the recommended structure and content for your business plan try:

Business Link (UK)

United States Small Business Administration

While neither one of these two sites offer any practical tools or templates they contain a lot of useful information that will no doubt help you in constructing a business plan.

Major Banks are usually very good and totally undervalued source of free information regarding business plan as well as some really useful templates and tools. Most of them have some sort of recommended templates or a simple software application offered free to the existing/potential customers.

For example:

HSBC

Royal Bank of Scotland

All of the above is very useful if you already know all of the parameters for your business plan and just need some assistance in putting this information into a proper format/presentation. But what can you do if you don’t know what the cost of sales, expenditure, depreciation, loan repayment, income before tax, etc. are going to be for your proposed business venture. Well, in this case you will need a software system known as Business Planner to help you in calculating all the parameters for your plan.