Budget Forecast Tool

It is a simple tool. Although there are some things missing, I hope it will help you to understand the timescale and the customer base that is required to generate the income.

Feel free to download a copy of this tool. Simply provide your email address and you will receive it in return.

You will find a short explanation of how it works in the “HELP” sheet. Yet I will explain how it works here.

Dashboard Sheet

The dashboard is here to summarise the Expenses and the Revenue and draw a picture of how the income will look like in time.

Colour highlights:

• Rows highlighted yellow are for months in which Revenue is greater than expenses
• Rows highlighted green are for months after the project breaks even, income for these months creates a pure profit.

You will also find two charts that cover Expenses vs Revenue and Income.

Expenses Sheet

This sheet is no brainer. You may add a new row with expenses and put its cost under any month. All monthly expenses are summed in row 2 and then imported to the Dashboard sheet.

Revenue Sheet

This spreadsheet requires more attention from you. The Revenue is based on a couple of factors that create a definition of a subscription plan:

• Revenue - a product from multiplying the number of active subscribers and the price of the plan;
• Active subscriptions - a number of subscriptions of a particular plan.
• Subscription plan price in dollars.
• Growth rate - a percentage of the growth you predict to have every month of your subscribers base.

Columns C-BJ of “Active Subscription” rows are defining the number of subscribers. You may edit them manually. In the example forecast, I’ve used a formula that will use the growth factor from the previous month to calculate the prediction of subscribers to the next month. For the “Basic” plan it will be applied from June 2021 and for the “Advanced” plan from September 2021. I’ve left this formula to work from July 2020 for a Plan defined in Cell A18. Feel free to modify the value of Growth rate (cell B18), plan price (B19) and enter the initial number of active subscribers in cell C18 to see how it works.

Use it for your project

Feel free to download a copy of this tool. If you have any suggestions on how to improve it, please feel free to leave a comment below.