Creating Realistic Financial Projections for Your Small Business

Event description

Where do your financial projections come from? Your knowledge of your business and industry, and your best estimates of what might happen.

• Purpose of Financial Projections:
  • Use to plan, set realistic goals, and secure funding.
  • Use as a roadmap to assessing the feasibility of your plan.
  • Importance in developing investor confidence & improving internal decision-making.
• Components of Financial Projections:
  • Sales Forecast: predicting future sales based on market research & historical data.
  • Expense Forecast: estimating fixed & variable costs over time.
  • Cash Flow Projection: projecting inflows and outflows to ensure liquidity.
• Creating the Projections:
  • Steps: gathering data, making assumptions, & applying forecasting methods.
  • Tools and software: use of a SCORE provided Excel spreadsheet model to generate a projection.  
  • Importance of recording assumptions & revisiting and adjusting projections regularly.
• Using Projections to Monitor Performance:
  • Comparing actual results against projections to measure performance.
  • Identifying variances & reasons behind them.
  • Making informed adjustments to strategies based on analysis.