In this article:
- What is the Guide?
- What are the Progress Indicators?
- Navigating LivePlan using the Guide
- Steps to complete in the Guide
What is the Guide?
The LivePlan Guide draws from our decades of business planning experience to present a business planning process that feels as natural as possible. This structured path leads you through the essential stages of crafting your business plan, from defining your business opportunity to forecasting financial needs. With clear steps, it helps you keep track of what's next.
When used in conjunction with our Progress Indicators, the Guide can also serve as a central organizational hub for your planning. Whether working solo or with a team, the Guide provides a quick and easily understandable snapshot of where you are in the planning process.
Note: The Guide and Progress Indicators are some of many features in LivePlan designed for easy team collaboration. To learn more about this, read Collaborating in LivePlan
What are the Progress Indicators?
The Progress Indicators are organizational markers found in topics in the plan and in Financial Tables in the forecast.
These handy tools allow you to monitor the completion status of each topic within your business plan. Here’s how they work:
- Not Started to In Progress: As soon as you begin adding content—like text or images—to a topic in the Plan section, the indicator will shift from Not Started to In Progress. Similarly, as you begin to add items to each page of your LivePlan Forecast, the progress indicator will update to In Progress.
- Needs Review: You can manually set a topic or a Forecast page to Needs Review as a reminder for further refinement or for a contributor to leave notes or make edits.
- Marking as Ready: You decide when a topic is complete. Simply click on the indicator next to the topic and select Ready from the dropdown menu.
Progress Indicators are designed to make planning and forecasting more manageable, giving you and your contributors a clear view of what’s done and what needs attention.
Navigating LivePlan using the Guide
The primary way to navigate LivePlan is through the left hand persistent menu. However, the structured path of the guide gives you and your team a way to navigate directly to the parts of LivePlan that are reflected in the Guide.
Navigating to LivePlan sections
Using the Guide, you can navigate to the View and Edit tab in the plan, the Financial Tables in the forecast, and download & print options from the Guide.
Navigating directly to topics or financial tables
You can also move directly to the different plan topics and financial tables of the forecast using the Guide. This allows you to quickly review the work you or your team has done in any of the included plan topics and forecast tables.
To navigate to a plan topic or forecast table, click on the heading of the section in the guide that you would like to navigate to expand that step. This will show the individual steps and their level of completion in that section.
Once the section is expanded, click on any of the navigation buttons to the right of the steps in that section to navigate to that selected plan topic or financial table.
Steps to complete in the Guide
The Guide is made up of eight steps, each of which contains several smaller steps that link directly to either topics in the plan or sections in the forecast. The steps are arranged in an order that starts with the most foundational concepts of your business idea before moving into more complicated topics that become more relevant once these initial steps begin to take shape.
Note: The LivePlan Guide is structured to mirror the default LivePlan outline. If topics from the default outline are removed, they will show as removed from the plan in the Guide
Define your business opportunity
This step takes you through the five topics that make up the Opportunity chapter of your written plan. Think through how you are solving a key problem for your target customers in a better way than the alternatives. Is this business opportunity worth pursuing for you?
- Plan - Problem Worth Solving
- Plan - Our Solution
- Plan - Market Size & Segments
- Plan - Current Alternatives
- Plan - Our Advantages
Determine whether you can make money
Get started on your financial forecast. Sketch out your potential revenue and expenses to create a picture of what your operating income may look like. Can this be a profitable business? This is an important step to help answer that question.
- Forecast - Revenue
- Forecast - Direct Costs
- Forecast - Personnel
- Forecast - Expenses
- Forecast - Assets
Figure out how you will acquire customers
Now that you’ve determined that the business idea is profitable and worth pursuing, return to the written plan to work on your sales and marketing strategy. How will you reach potential customers and convince them to try your solution?
- Plan - Marketing Plan
- Plan - Sales Plan
Work out the execution details
If your Opportunity chapter is the ‘what’ of your business idea, the Execution chapter is the ‘how.’ Identify the locations, technology, and equipment you’ll need to make your business plan a reality.
- Plan - Locations & Facilities
- Plan - Technology
- Plan - Equipment & Tools
- Plan - Add Milestones
- Plan - Key Metrics
Explain why you are the right match for this opportunity
This step takes you through the Company chapter of the written plan. This is where you get to tell your story to any potential investors reading your plan. Outline the ownership, management team, and advisory board to demonstrate why you and your team have the expertise to make the business a success.
- Plan - Ownership & Structure
- Plan - Management Team
- Plan - Advisors
Forecast your cash flow and funding needs
Explore the financial elements that will impact your cash flow and understand the funding requirements to sustain and grow your business.
- Forecast - Taxes
- Forecast - Cash Flow Assumptions
- Forecast - Dividends
- Forecast - Financing
- Plan - Use of funds
- Plan - Sources of funds
Add a compelling executive summary
Consolidate your business plan by crafting an executive summary that captures the essence of your vision, strategy, and financial prospects. We encourage LivePlan users to wait until you’re finished to write your executive summary. After all, you can create a more compelling summary of your plan once you have all the details in place.
- Plan - Executive Summary
Review and export your plan
Reviewing your plan and forecast prior to exporting is one of the most important steps you can take before presenting your plan to potential investors. Make sure your plan is consistent all the way through, makes sense from an outside perspective, and reflects you as the entrepreneur behind this new business idea.
Need some expert feedback? LivePlan has a team of experienced professionals who will review your plan and provide critical, constructive, and actionable feedback to help you apply the finishing touches needed for a polished, lender-ready document.