Standard Business Plan Financials: 3 Essential Projections

Yesterday I posted here the six key financial terms every business owner or startup leader needs to know. That’s reposted from my site on Lean Business Planning. These six terms work into three essential statements (for past results) or projections (in business plans or anything referring to the future) for standard business plan financials. A pro-forma statement, by the way, is another way to say projection. TheProfit and Loss (also called Income) includes Sales, Costs and Expenses. The Balance includes Assets, Liabilities, and Capital.

Profit & Loss, Balance, and Cash Flow

And these three are conceptually linked and interconnected. The following illustration shows how they relate to each other:

linking financials graphic

The standards of accounting, like double-entry bookkeeping, make a delightfully automatic error check with the three statements. They link up conceptually so that if the balance doesn’t balance, it’s wrong. If assets are not the sum of capital plus liabilities, it’s wrong. If retained earnings don’t add up to profits less distributions to owners (as in dividends, or owners’ draw), it’s wrong. If your spreadsheet, or your software, doesn’t reflect every change in the profits to the cash and balance, and every change in balance to cash, then it’s wrong.

I’ve heard an intelligent successful lawyer claim that double-entry bookkeeping was the most important invention of the western world. I’m not going to go there in this book. I’m not doing debits and credits. But knowing how these statements link up is important. Having standard business plan financials matters if you have a business plan event and have to show your business plan to bankers or investors.

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