Introduction to BudgetPilot

BudgetPilot is specifically designed for entrepreneurs and is intended to assist those who understand the budgeting process the least.

Budgeting is as critical as the strategic planning side of the business. Bad budgeting simply trashes your strategies and makes them worthless. Strategies and the business startup process require finance and tight control of those budgets.

A failure to achieve sales targets in the budgets invariably leads to insufficient working capital to generate sales with. No cashflow leads perhaps to no advertising, which leads to no sales next month.

How do you know how much capital you will require, daily, weekly, monthly and annually? Your budget tells you, assuming you have a well prepared budget to start with.

If you are looking for any type of funding, funders want to see these numbers to assess the risk of lending to you. Poor budgets either stop investment or attract investment at much higher interest costs.

Angels, VCs and equity funders, as well as banks and all others, will all want to see the numbers before considering a funding application.

The requirements vary but could require at most a 2 year financial history, the current year data, and a 3 year forward projection. If the business is a startup they would like to see as much as a 5 year budget. While it can vary between funders, it is unlikely to exceed these requirements.

Our software assists in minimising the capture of the minimum data and assists with the extrapolation. As a new business, the traditional approach with a spreadsheet could easily take as much as 7 days, whereas our system takes 3 to 6 hours.

The system will also allow for dealer discounts if you are selling through agents or dealers, adjusting for dealer discounts, and will display sales data split between retail and dealer sales.

This application reduces the time to a day maximum, if you give it your full attention.

It then produces for the full period:

• Income statements
• Balance sheets
• Cash flow statements

This allows funders to understand the full financial implications of the business owner's intended borrowings and use thereof. They can then assess their risk in providing finance to the borrower.

They appreciate seeing the history, current and future financials to identify trends if applicable, which in turn allows them to request more information if they need it and make a more informed decision.

The system will guide you through the complete process, and after you have completed it you can still review and edit.