Democracy At Work Institute

This workbook is a template for designing a preliminary pro forma business plan.

The purpose of the template is to introduce basic concepts to beginners, and to allow for quick feasibility inquries.

For simplicity it is designed to illustrate a retail store.

Every business is diffferent and their financial projects will need customization.

Feel free to adapt this to your needs, or to contact DAWI to request technical assistance.

Each tab has some cells that are colored yellow.

These are the cells you should fill in with your responses to the prompting questions.

Your responses will be used to fill out the rest of the sheet.

Anything that is not yellow you should not change.

Try it here. Enter your business name. This will show up on all the other pages.

Financial statements are a map. You plan your journey with them, but it is likely you will sometimes veer from the path.

Financial statements are a recipe. If you want to make more pancakes, you need to scale all the ingredients in proportion, not just increase the eggs.

When possible, don't think about dollars, think about people.

Think about how you would answer if a lender was looking at a number and asked you where it came from. Can you defend it?

Start by filling out the workbook in the following order.

You can go back and change your numbers, but if you jump ahead some of the formulas may not work.

This template does not include a Balance Sheet template.

We plan to include one in a future version.