Price: £19.95
Summary
BusinessPlanWiz is an on-line method of generating a business plan, by answering a series of questions. It then assembles those answers into a business plan format, which you can download as a Word or PDF document. There is also a cash-flow spreadsheet that comes with the bought version.
Detail
This was one of the first to use the Internet to deliver a business planning application. The actual software that drives it doesn't sit on your PC, but rather on a web server which you access. This does of course mean that you must have Internet access every time that you wish to write your business plan. However, most people do have good Internet connections now days, as long as you don't want to sit in a mountain retreat, or a sunny beach, to do the plan.
You can't really compare this to the more comprehensive business plan applications, which would sit on your own PC, however for small businesses and those seeking a bank loan, it provides a very cost effective solution.
After registering on the BusinessPlanWiz site you can start your business plan straight away and for free. Not needing to pay until the end when you would want to download the plan that was created.
The site is clean and fairly easy to use, with the questions you are answering in the middle and a list of 11 steps to cover in the planning process on the right-hand side. At the end of each step you can chose to save and continue, save and exit, or to preview your plan so far (as a jpg image). By clicking on a step it can jump to that set of questions. There is also a visual indicator, by way of a pie chart, that tells you how much you have completed.
The questions asked are good, in that they will raise the important issues that a new, or small business owner should be thinking about. Although there are no examples of complete plans, or of possible answers to the questions, there is often a selection of check-boxes that are helpful indications of areas that one should be addressing. So for instance in "How will you market your business?", there are 14 suggestions with a check-box next to each where you can elaborate under that suggested heading (telesales, social media, exhibitions, etc).
You can save your plan on their server for 28 days free of charge and then for a further 11 months if you go ahead and buy it. When you buy it you get to download the cash flow template. The template is an Excel spreadsheet and after you enter your sales and expenses, will show your opening bank balance and closing bank balance for each of the months for the first year. Useful for planning ahead what your cashflow is likely to be.
The downloaded Word (or PDF) document is assembled from your answers and put into headings. You can then edit and add your logo for instance into the final document.
Pros
- Easy to use.
- Downloadable in standard Word or PDF formats.
- Inexpensive.
Cons
- Not suitable for larger businesses or raising private equity funds.
- Not able to produce Profit & Loss, or Balance Sheet.
- Need to be connected to the Internet while using.
Available from:
BusinessPlanWiz
