Are you curious about the latest updates and enhancements to LivePlan? Keep reading to discover what our team has been developing.
October 2024
Projected Values Based on Existing Performance
When connected to QuickBooks Online or Xero, LivePlan’s Forecast Builder uses your accounting data to generate a starting forecast. If you have 13 or more months of historical data, LivePlan calculates the average rate of change based on overlapping months from the current and previous year. For less than 13 months of data, LivePlan uses the most recent values and replicates them year-over-year to create a baseline forecast.
September 2024
Single-Page Forecast Editor
We've introduced a single-page forecast editor that consolidates all elements of a forecast entry on to one page, greatly simplifying the process. This approach makes it easier to understand and manage the full scope of each entry without needing to switch between multiple screens or recall what was previously entered. With everything in one place, it’s simpler to maintain accuracy and make informed adjustments.
August 2024
Forecast Overview
Get a high-level summary of your forecast in a simplified, easy-to-read view, perfect for quick reviews and presentations.
Revenue as a Percentage of another Revenue stream
This feature allows you to link the financial performance of one part of your business to another in a dynamic way. For example, if you sell a product and also offer a service tied to that product, such as installation or ongoing maintenance, you can forecast the service revenue as a percentage of the related product sales. This approach simplifies your forecasting by ensuring that changes in product revenue automatically update the linked service revenue, maintaining consistency and reflecting the dependency between these revenue streams. This is particularly useful when your business has multiple interconnected products or services, ensuring that all forecasts reflect their true financial relationships.
Custom Tax Payment Schedule
Custom tax payment schedules in LivePlan allow you to set specific dates for when tax payments are made in your forecast. This feature is useful for aligning your tax obligations with your business's actual cash flow, offering more control over how and when taxes are reflected in your financial plan. By customizing the payment schedule, you can ensure more accurate cash flow projections for your business.
AI Selection of Industry
LivePlan AI will now assist in selecting the most relevant industry data based on the information available about your business, saving time and ensuring accuracy.
July 2024
AI Custom Instructions
LivePlan customizes the built-in instructions to suit your specific business, providing tailored guidance throughout the planning process. This feature enhances your experience by offering more relevant insights and suggestions, making it easier to refine your business strategy.
Video in the Pitch
You can now embed videos directly into your LivePlan Pitch, making it easier to share visual content with investors or stakeholders.
Industry Data
LivePlan's Industry Data feature helps businesses compare their financial performance to industry standards by using NAICS codes. It automatically suggests relevant benchmarks based on your business description, allowing you to see key metrics like profitability and cash flow compared to similar businesses.
Change Forecast Start Date with Values in the Same Actual Month
When changing your start date, you can now choose to keep values in their original calendar months. This ensures that forecast data remains in the same month that you originally entered it in. For instance, expenses planned for August will stay in August, ensuring accuracy for seasonal businesses.
June 2024
Expanded List View to Direct Costs and Dividends
We’ve extended the list view experience to include direct costs and dividends. This enhancement provides a more comprehensive and organized way to manage and review these financial elements, ensuring a consistent and streamlined experience across all financial data.
Improved Forecast Navigation
We’ve updated the styling of the forecast sub-navigation. The new design simplifies the navigation by making the different pages in the Financial Tables section appear more like filters within a single view. This change aims to improve the user experience by making it easier to navigate and find the information you need.
Variable Interest Rates for Loans
You can now enter variable interest rates for loans. This feature allows you to more accurately reflect the terms of your loans in your financial forecasts, providing greater flexibility and precision in your planning.
Connect to Accounting Embed on Forecast Overview
We’ve added the option to connect to your accounting software directly from the forecast overview. This integration allows for seamless synchronization of your financial data, making it easier to maintain up-to-date and accurate forecasts.
We hope these updates enhance your experience with LivePlan. As always, we value your feedback and are committed to continuous improvement. Stay tuned for more exciting updates next month!
May 2024
Expanded Forecast List View to Expenses Tab
Previously available only on the Revenue tab, the list view experience has now been extended to the Expenses tab. This update allows you to easily manage and review your expenses in a more organized and efficient manner. This feature aims to provide a consistent and streamlined forecasting experience across both revenue and expenses.
Google Pay Now Accepted
We are thrilled to announce that Google Pay is now accepted as a payment method in LivePlan. This integration offers you more flexibility and convenience when managing your subscriptions and payments, making the process faster and more secure.
Improved Forecast Overview
We’ve made significant enhancements to the forecast overview, ensuring it provides even more insightful and actionable data. These improvements aim to help you better understand and manage your financial forecasts, allowing for more accurate and effective business planning.
Secondary Email Field for Account Recovery
To bolster account security and ensure you can always recover your account, we’ve added a secondary email field. This additional email address will serve as a backup for account recovery, providing an extra layer of security and peace of mind.
April 2024
Switch direct costs and expenses
With the new Expense-Direct Cost Conversion feature, you can seamlessly switch any expense entry to a direct cost entry, or vice versa, directly within the forecasting tool. Whether refining your cost structure or reevaluating an expense, this feature allows for easy categorization changes.
To access the new command, simply navigate to the More actions menu located on expense and direct cost entries. From there, select Change to Direct Cost or Expense, confirm your selection, and the forecast item will be moved to the newly-selected category.
Move schedule section
We've moved LivePlan's Schedule feature from the left sidebar to a new location within the Plan. It is now visible in the Plan section by clicking Milestones. Previously available only on LivePlan Premium, this feature is now available for all LivePlan users.
March 2024
Import actuals from .CSV
We are excited to announce that LivePlan Premium users can now take advantage of new options when entering past financial data into their Dashboard. With this update, LivePlan has introduced a pre-formatted CSV spreadsheet template that can be used to quickly enter past financial data into LivePlan after building a forecast. This feature was added in response to multiple requests from users for a spreadsheet-based method to enter financial data into LivePlan.
Additional monthly detail in the forecast
LivePlan users can now add monthly details for up to five years in their forecast. Earlier, five-year projections could only include monthly details for three years, with annual totals for years four and five. This limitation has been lifted, and users can now include monthly details for all five years of their forecast. This feature can be enabled through the Forecast Options menu, allowing for more accurate long-term forecasting.
February 2024
In-line forecast editing
LivePlan has introduced a new feature that makes forecasting quicker and more convenient. Users can now edit their forecast entries directly from the forecast overview pages. Previously, users had to click into each entry separately to make changes, which could be time-consuming, especially for those with many entries to edit.
This new feature allows users to easily make forecast edits to varying amount over time entries. These are entries that change values throughout the forecast period, as opposed to those that remain constant. To modify an entry, simply click on the double-boxed cell on the forecast overview page, enter a new figure, and either hit tab to move to the next cell or click outside the cell to save the updated number. This process is as easy as tabbing through a spreadsheet.
January 2024
Apple Pay now available
We've expanded our payment options to include Apple Pay, which is now available for all users of Apple's Safari browser on mobile and desktop.
December 2023
Improved forecasting experience
Dive into your financial forecasting with a fresh, intuitive interface. We've reimagined the design of our forecast pages, including revenue, expenses, and personnel, to maximize screen space and enhance user experience. Planning your financial future has never been more straightforward or visually engaging.
Schedule Updates
This month, LivePlan's Schedule received a clean new design, making navigation and milestone scheduling easier than ever.
November 2023
AI-Powered Executive Summary
We’re thrilled to introduce a new feature that revolutionizes how you create your executive summary. Our new "Help Me Write" feature employs advanced AI to take the comprehensive details from your business plan and craft a concise, impactful executive summary. This means less time spent on summarizing and more time on strategizing. Available now for all users, this feature is currently in beta as we fine-tune it based on your valuable feedback.
Guided Business Planning
Navigating the complexities of business planning is now even easier with our latest addition – the Guide. 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 tasks and sub-tasks, you'll never lose track of what's next. Plus, our progress tracking feature keeps you informed of how close you are to completing your masterpiece.
Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to refine and expand LivePlan’s features to support your business planning journey. Your feedback is invaluable to us, so please don't hesitate to share your thoughts and experiences with these new enhancements.
October 2023
Progress is this October's theme, with our Plan and Forecast sections receiving a new progress indicator.
Plan and Forecast Progress Indicators
Keep track of your business plan creation with our new Plan & Forecast Progress Indicators! 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.
September 2023
We're excited to bring you some notable changes to the LivePlan platform this month! Our focus has been on making your planning and company management tasks even easier, so let's dive right in.
A Faster Way to Add Topics, Charts, or Tables to Your Plan
No more zigzagging through different views! Now, you can add new plan elements directly from the Plan View. As you hover between existing elements, a new button will appear, allowing you to add a Topic, Chart, or Table instantly.
Introducing a Streamlined Executive Summary
We've reimagined how the Executive Summary should work. Now, when you create a new company using our standard template, you'll find a simpler and more focused Executive Summary section. This section sits right at the top of your plan, making it easier to access and edit. In addition, LivePlan's Pitch topic now features LivePlan Assistant in order to help you create an unforgettable pitch.
Sort Your Company List Your Way
If you manage multiple companies in LivePlan, we've got good news for you! You can now sort your list of companies either by the last edited date or by the date they were created. This setting will remember your preference, so you'll always pick up right where you left off. This feature is available for users with seven or more companies.
August 2023
Our developers worked hard in August to deliver another batch of fresh features to boost your business plan.
Smart Personnel and Direct Cost Suggestions
LivePlan Assistant just got smarter! Just like the revenue and expense suggestions released earlier, it provides tailored suggestions for adding personnel and direct costs to your forecast. Modify your business type and description under the Options menu to refine these recommendations.
Improvements:
More Room for Your Pitch
Good news! You now have extra room to make your business pitch stand out. And don't worry about overshooting—our handy indicator will turn yellow as you approach the limit and red once you've maxed out.
New Look for the Sidebar
We have updated the left sidebar to provide easier access to various features. You can now activate the Command Bar (highlighted in black), Connect to Accounting (outlined in yellow), access the Account menu (highlighted in red), and manage your companies and scenarios (shown in green) all from one convenient location.
July 2023
AI Assistant updates
In July, we continued our efforts to integrate LivePlan Assistant into more areas of the Forecast section, and now users can access expense suggestions directly on the Expenses page. Suggest Expenses is extremely helpful in ensuring that all expenses are carefully considered, which can help prevent unexpected surprises and lead to a more accurate forecast.
LivePlan Assistant now includes a new feature in the Plan section called Help Me Write. This feature allows you to easily turn brief notes or ideas into a complete passage for any Plan topic. Simply look for the Help Me Write option for any empty plan topic in LivePlan's Plan section.
Automatically find NAICS category
If you're a LivePlan Premium user, you may have noticed a new feature in the Benchmark section. Your NAICS category is now determined automatically based on your business name and description, which you can edit in the Options section. This is helpful because NAICS categories can be confusing, but LivePlan will now figure out where your business belongs and set a NAICS category for you to compare in the Benchmarks section.
June 2023
AI Assistant updates
We've recently added functionality to the LivePlan AI Assistant. Now you can use the AI Assistant to suggest revenue streams for your company. This can help planners make sure that they aren't missing any potential revenue opportunities for their business.
To discover potential revenue streams for your business, provide a brief description, and LivePlan will suggest options. You can easily add these suggestions to your Forecast by selecting the ones you want. The revenue streams will be automatically included, making it easier than ever to create projections.
In the Plan section, LivePlan Assistant gained a new Rewrite option.
Command bar updates
Did you know that LivePlan has a shortcut menu called the Command Bar that can be accessed from any section of the app by pressing the command (cmd) + K keys at the same time? Now that menu is even more useful, allowing you to navigate throughout the LivePlan app swiftly, jump to specific scenarios, switch companies, and more.
Custom Themes in the Pitch
Want a little more control over the look of your Pitch? Just click on Select a Theme, now available in the Pitch section of LivePlan, and select one of the themes, or use the Custom Color option to pick the perfect shade for your Pitch.
May 2023
LivePlan AI Assistant
We are thrilled to introduce our latest feature, LivePlan Assistant, powered by AI technology. With LivePlan Assistant, you can quickly reword any topic in the Plan section with personalized grammar, tone, and formatting suggestions.
We'll be expanding LivePlan Assistant's functionality in the coming months to LivePlan's Forecast and beyond.
April 2023
Undo & redo in the topic editor
We've recently added undo and redo buttons to the Plan topic editor. Now, you can easily navigate through your most recent changes to the topic, giving you greater control and flexibility when crafting your content.
Easier access to the topic editor
After receiving feedback from users, we made the entire plan topic clickable to enter the topic editor. Previously only the "Edit" button would enter the editor.
Click anywhere to edit plan topics
New topic editor design
We have also refreshed the plan editor experience by moving the sidebar to the right to better focus attention on the written content. Topic instructions and examples are now found along the right side of the editor window.
Old topic editor New topic editor
Varying percentage for burden rate
In accounting, the term burden rate refers to the percentage of additional indirect costs of paying an employee beyond their base salary. These additional costs, listed as employee-related expenses on financial statements, can change over time as healthcare, insurance, taxes, and other expenses change. Now you can set your burden rate to change year to year or even month to month.
March 2023
Dividends as a percent of net profit
We've added more flexibility to LivePlan's dividend model. Now you can forecast dividends as a percent of your net profit (in addition to the one-time, monthly, and varying amounts over time options. This means that your dividend projections scale automatically with your company's profitability.
Pitch design refresh
The Pitch tab received a number of visual updates to provide a cleaner, easier-to-navigate experience.