3 (free) tools to help SaaS founders with their 2017 planning

(As you can see, I really like placeit.net :) )

In case you haven't started to think about your plan for 2017 yet, now's the time. To help you a little bit with your planning, here are three little tools that you might find useful. If you're a long-time reader of this blog, you may have seen them before.

1. Growth Calculator

This little tool allows you to enter your MRR as of the end of 2016 and a target growth factor for 2017. It then calculates your MRR target for the end of 2017 and shows you three different growth paths that lead to that goal. One is based on linear growth, one on exponential growth and the third one shows a trajectory between the linear and the exponential path.

• Growth Calculator 
• Original blog post from last year with some additional notes

Please note that although this Google Sheet may look a bit like a financial plan, it's not meant to be your plan. :) To create a credible and realistic plan, you need to have a "bottom-up" projection of your growth drivers (e.g. your conversion funnel, distribution channels and sales team quotas).  What this little calculator can do is quickly give you a sense for how much MRR you have to add each month in 2017 in order to reach your growth targets, so you can use it to play around with different scenarios and assumptions.

2. Sales Team Hiring Plan

This tool helps you find out how many sales people you need to hire in 2017 based on your growth targets and other import inputs such as your MRR churn rate,  your sales team's quota, ramp-up times, etc.

• Sales Team Hiring Plan
• Original blog post with some additional background

The model is based on an exponential growth path (i.e. #2 from the Growth Calculator above), i.e. it works with a constant m/m growth rate, which you can set in cell D11 and D12 for 2017 and 2018, respectively. You can easily adjust this to a different growth path by changing row 22 accordingly.

One of the things which the model doesn't take into account is employee turnover. In sales teams, employee churn can be significant, both because not every sales person that you hire will work out and because the average tenure of an AE might be only, say, two years. When I tried to add this to the model it became too complex for what I think should stay a pretty simple template. I might give it another go later. In the meantime, I'd recommend that when you build your own hiring plan, assume that if you need x AEs you'll have to hire n*x AEs, and that n is probably something between 1.1 and 2, depending on how good you are at hiring salespeople.

3. Financial Plan

This template helps you create a full financial plan that includes everything from revenue modeling to costs projections and headcount planning. If you look at it for the first time, it might look a little terrifying. I did try to keep it as simple as possible, but if you prefer a simpler version I also have an older, less sophisticated alternative.

• SaaS Financial Plan 2.0
• Notes on the 2.0 version
• SaaS Financial Plan 1.0 (the original, simpler version)
• Notes on the 1.0 version

I hope you find some of this useful. Happy planning!

SaaS Financial Plan 2.0 - bug fixes

Since I published v2 of my SaaS Financial Plan a few days ago, two alert readers have kindly pointed out two formula errors in the Excel sheet. Sorry about that.

Here's a corrected version. The Excel sheet that was linked from the original post has been corrected as well.

In case you've started to modify the template already and want to keep working with the previous version, here are the two bugs that you need to correct:

1) Cell U124 on the Costs tab, i.e. the costs for external recruiters in December 2016, contained:

=(W87-U87)*$E$124+X96

The +X96 part has been added accidentally and needs to be removed. So the correct version is:

=(W87-U87)*$E$124

2) Row 55 on the Revenues tab, i.e. the CACs for the Pro plan, is completely wrong. It should be, for column I (with the other columns following analogously):

=0,5*(Costs!J62+Costs!J96+Costs!J104+Costs!J112+Costs!J122)/I49

Once again, apologies for the inconvenience. If I or somebody else finds any other bugs, I will fix them ASAP and update the change log here.

PS: Before you ask – yes, I'm aware that it's ironic that I have to post an on-premise software style bug patch to a SaaS financial planning template. Ironic in an Alanis Morissette kind of way, that is, because "ironic" actually means something completely different. Google it if you don't believe me.

[Update  06/30/2016: I've fixed two further small issues that were reported by two kind readers in the comments below.]

SaaS Financial Plan 2.0

Almost exactly four years ago I published a financial plan template for SaaS startups based on a model that I had created for Zendesk a few years earlier. I received a lot of great feedback on the template and the original post remains one of the most viewed posts on this blog up to this day.

In the last few weeks I've finally found some time to create a "v2" of the template ... just in time for a little Easter gift to the SaaS community. ;-) I'd recommend that you read this post first since it includes some important notes, but if you prefer to check out the template right away click here to download the Excel sheet.

The original v1 model was a very simple plan for early-stage SaaS startups with a low-touch sales model. As I wrote in the original post:

It's a simple plan for an early-stage SaaS startup with a low-touch sales model – a company which markets a SaaS solution via its website, offers a 30 day free trial, gets most of its trial users organically and through online marketing and converts them into paying customer with very little human interaction. Therefore the key drivers of my imaginary startup are organic growth rate, marketing budget and customer acquisition costs, conversion rate, ARPU and churn rate. If you have a SaaS startup with a higher-touch sales model where revenue growth is largely driven by sales headcount, the plan needs to be modified accordingly.

The new version comes with a number of improvements:

• Support for multiple pricing tiers
• Support for annual contracts with annual pre-payments
• Much more solid headcount planning
• Better visibility into "MRR movements"
• Better cash-flow planning
• Charts galore :-)

The downside of these improvements is that the spreadsheet has become significantly larger and more complex, but I tried my best to find the right balance. Also, the vast majority of the numbers in the sheet are calculated and the number of input cells is fairly limited.

The spreadsheet should be pretty self-explanatory but I've included a number of comments in the spreadsheet. Make sure to check them out - some of them are important in order to understand the model (in case you're not familiar with that Excel feature, hover over the little red triangles).

Here are a some additional notes:

1) General comments

• The sheet is hot off the press and given the large amount of formulas I can't rule out that there are bugs. If you find one, please email me at and I'll fix it ASAP.
• Blue numbers indicate data-entry cells. Black and grey numbers are computed.
• The model contains a lot of simplifications. Don't expect that it will perfectly fit your specific business - consider it a starting point.

2.) "Summary" tab

• The "Summary" tab contains only two types of input cells: Your starting bank balance and cash injections from financings. Everything else is calculated, mostly using data from subsequent tabs.
• As with all input cells in the model, consider the values that I've put in to be dummy data. Fill those cells with your own data and assumptions.
• The model doesn't take into account interest or taxes (except for payroll taxes).
• The "Revenues" line shows your end-of-month MRR for the respective month. This is not compliant with the US GAAP definition of "revenues", which uses different revenue recognition rules, but since SaaS companies live and breathe MRR I think it's the right approach for a SaaS financial model.

3.) "Revenues" tab

• The model assumes that you have three pricing tiers. I've called them "Basic", "Pro" and "Enterprise". If you have more or fewer pricing plans you can of course adjust the model accordingly (with some effort). It is further assumed that all Basic and Pro customers are on monthly plans and that all Enterprise customers are on annual plans.
• The model assumes that you're getting signups organically and via paid marketing and that you're converting a percentage of them into Basic customers and Pro customers. You can change the key assumptions such as your organic growth rate and your conversion rates in the grey area on the left.
• The Enterprise customer segment follows a different logic, based on the assumption that Enterprise customer acquisition is sales-driven as opposed to the marketing-driven low-touch sales model for Basic and Pro customers. The key drivers in the Enterprise segment of the model are your revenue targets, sales team quotas and your assumptions for churn and upsells.
• The spreadsheet shows the impact of e.g. Basic customers who upgrade to Pro and Pro customers who upgrade to Enterprise, but to keep things simple it doesn't support each and every possible movement between plans. For example, I didn't include the option for Basic customers to upgrade to Enterprise straight away or for Enterprise customers to downgrade. If this is a relevant factor in your business, you can of course accommodate for that by adding a few extra rows.
• For Basic and Pro customers, the model allows you to project ARPA development using a given ARPA at the beginning of the planning period along with assumptions on monthly ARPA increases. For Enterprise customers, the model assumes pricing increases at the time of renewal but not during the term of the subscription. Depending on your specific pricing model you'll have to modify that, e.g. to allow for Enterprise customers to add more seats continuously.
• In order to be able to calculate churn for Enterprise customers in the 1st year of the plan, it is assumed that existing Enterprise customers have been acquired over the course of the previous 12 months. This is of course a somewhat theoretical assumption and you need to adjust the model to include your actual numbers.
• As you can see in one of the charts below the numbers, the model allows you to calculate your "MRR movements". It's worth pointing out that the model currently doesn't show "Expansion MRR" and "Contraction MRR" separately but only the delta of the two, which I've called "Net Expansion MRR". In order to calculate Expansion MRR and Contraction MRR separately I'd have to add a couple of additional rows. To avoid making things too complicated, I decided against doing that for now. Fortunately ChartMogul (a Point Nine portfolio company, sorry for the plug) makes it super easy to drill down into all of your MRR movements.
• Please note that the CAC data and "CAC payback time" calculation are based on pretty crude simplifications. A solid planning of CAC payback times, CAC/LTV ratios etc. would require a lot of additional input data.
• The rows with the "Thereof bonuses..." label contain matrix formulas. Handle with care. :)

4.) "Costs" tab

• In order to adjust headcount planning in the G&A, R&D and marketing departments, change the assumptions for start date, base salary and bonus in the grey "Assumptions" area. You can remove, change or add roles in column H.
• With the exception of the VP of Sales role, sales staff headcount planning is done on the separate "Sales Team Hiring Plan" tab (re-using a model that I've built for this post). It calculates the number of sales people that you need based on the growth targets for your Enterprise customer segment, the quota of your sales people and a few other variables.
• Headcount planning for the Customer Success team is (again with the exception of the VP) done formulaically as well, based on assumptions on how many customers a customer success team member can handle.
• It is assumed that there's only one team, which I've called Customer Success, which does both customer support and customer success. Many SaaS companies have different teams for the two functions; if you're one of them you can adjust the plan accordingly. 
• The costs for the Customer Success team are attributed to CoGS. This is debatable – if your Customer Success team plays an important role in converting signups or upselling customers you should consider allocating at least a portion of these costs to S&M and include those costs in your CACs. Please note that changing the "cost type" in column I will not automatically move the costs to a different category on the "Summary" tab so you'll have to do that manually.
• The model assumes that payroll tax is the same for all employees. This may have to be adjusted, e.g. if you have people in different countries.
• Regarding the cash impact of expenses, the model assumes that:
• payroll taxes are paid monthly
• bonuses are paid yearly (except for the sales team)
• sales team bonuses are paid quarterly (since bonuses/commissions play a much stronger role in sales compared to other departments)
• The model (somewhat simplistically) assumes that there are no capital expenditures. If you make investments into things like servers, computers or office furniture you should add these expenses accordingly.

If you've made it this far and haven't downloaded the Excel sheet yet: Here it is.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, let me know in the comments or email me. And if you like the model, tweet it out. :)

Finally, big thanks to Chris Amani, Sr. Finance Director at Humanity, as well as to Pawel and Dominik of Point Nine, for reviewing drafts of the model and for providing valuable feedback.

A simple tool to improve your 2016 planning

In my last post I wrote about the problem with month-over-month growth rates. One of the issues I talked about was that when your revenue plan numbers are based on a constant m/m percentage growth figure (i.e. you're projecting to grow exponentially), your short-term objectives are likely too low relative to your longer-term goals.

As an example, I showed a (fictional) SaaS startup that wants to grow from $1,000 in MRR to ~ $85,000 in MRR within one year. If that company projects exponential growth, it will have to add less than $7,000 in net new MRR in the first half of the year in order to be on track ... but to stay on track, it needs to add more than 10x that amount in the second half of the year!

To follow-up on the topic, I've put together a very simple (Google Sheets based) calculator which startup founders might find useful when they work on their plan for 2016. The purpose of this simple sheet is not to replace a thorough bottom-up planning which is based on the key drivers of your business. Instead, the idea is that it might be a useful input or cross-check for a more detailed plan.

Click here to check out the tool.

Here's what it does:

• You enter your start MRR in the orange field at the top left
• You enter your target growth for the year in the orange field in the middle
• The sheet will then calculate three alternative paths to your target MRR for the end of the year

The first one is based on linear growth. It just takes the total net new MRR that you want to add throughout the year and assumes that you're adding 1/12th of it each month.

The second one is based on an exponential growth assumption, i.e. it assumes that you're growing at a constant percentage growth rate every month.

The third alternative, which I've called "Happy Medium", has a growth curve that sits between the linear and the exponential option. You can see that well if you take a look at the charts below the numbers.

I think most early-stage startups should project a trajectory which, like the "Happy Medium" path", is somewhere between the linear and the exponential option. What do you think?

The problem with month-over-month growth rates

Most fundraising decks contain a slide with a chart that looks roughly like this:

Chart #1

Or this:

Chart #2

I’ve also seen charts that look like this:

Chart #3

Or this:

Chart #4

Chart #3 and #4 are good for a LOL (or a “WTF!”, depending on your sense of humour), and fortunately we’re not getting too many of these (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, take another look at the charts). A chart that looks similar to #1 or #2 is something we look at on a daily basis, though.

What all of these charts and their headlines have in common is that they’re trying to convey exponential growth. Since traction is the #1 factor that determines fundraising success, it’s understandable that founders try hard to show exponential growth (which talking about a m/m growth rate implies). This is especially true if you’re one out of 50 startups that present at a “demo day” and you have three minutes to get investors excited. At some of the demo days that I’ve attended, I felt like this led to an arm’s race for the highest growth rates and sometimes made me feel like this:

Let’s look at the numbers behind chart #1 and #2.

Chart 1:

As you can see, chart #1 shows very strong signs of exponential growth: this (fictional) company’s MRR is growing at a relatively steady rate of 18-21% per month, and the amount of net new MRR which the company is adding is growing every month. Mathematically this looks clearly exponential, and yet, since the absolute numbers are still so low, unless you understand the drivers behind the growth you don’t know if there’s real, sustainable exponential growth (e.g. due to product virality) or if it’s just a series of step changes which makes the numbers look like exponential growth.

If this sounds like an academic question to you, think about its impact on the company’s growth projections. If there’s true exponential growth at a rate of around 20% per month, the company’s numbers will quickly go through the roof. If, on the other hand, the growth isn’t driven by inherently exponential drivers, you should expect the growth rate to decline quickly, leading to much lower projections.

Now let’s turn to the data behind chart #2:

If you take a closer look at the numbers, you can see that in contrast to chart #1, in spite of the chart’s headline and trendline, it doesn’t look like something’s growing exponentially here. The monthly growth rate is higher than 10% in all but two months, but it’s fluctuating heavily and the amount of net new MRR is going up and down. You can calculate a growth rate of 40% per month on average or a compound monthly growth rate (CMGR) of 35% without having to lie, and you can have Excel draw a trendline using an exponential regression. But I believe this is highly misleading. A more reasonable way of describing this company’s revenue growth would be to say that the company has been adding between $300 and $700 in net new MRR per month in the last ~ 12 months.

Again, all of this may sound somewhat academic, but I think it has practical relevance in two ways: The first one is about how you communicate your numbers to potential investors when you’re fundraising. The second one is about how you’re projecting growth and what targets you’re setting for your team. Let’s take a closer look at both of them.

1) When you’re talking to investors you of course want to show your numbers in the best possible light, and to say that you’re increasing revenue by $300-700 per month (to use the example from above) may not sound as exciting as a CMGR of 35%. However, keep in mind that experienced investors have very fine-tuned BS antennas, and if an investor gets the impression that you’re getting too creative in your interpretation of your data, that’s a huge turn-off. Therefore I’d recommend the following:

• If your numbers look similar to chart #2 from above, don’t try to read exponential growth into the chart.
• If your numbers look more like chart #1, i.e. your monthly percentage growth is pretty stable and your monthly $ growth (or user growth, if you’re a consumer startup and pre-monetization) is going up consistently, it’s fair to talk about exponential growth. That said, as long as you’re at a very low absolute levels (say below ~ $20k in MRR if you’re a SaaS startup) it doesn’t make too much sense to talk about percentage growth rates, and talking about growth in terms of net new MRR per month may be more useful.
• When you’ve reached what Jason M. Lemkin calls “Initial Traction” – around $1-2M in ARR – consider talking about y/y growth instead of m/m growth. There’s no strong rationale for that, but I think if you’re talking about longer periods of time, y/y growth is more intuitive to understand.

2) As far as your internal goal-setting goes, the problem with an exponential growth assumption is that for early-stage startups it makes short-term goals too easy and longer-term goals too hard (unless you’re one of the 0.0...1% of startups that have a viral growth engine with a viral coefficient greater than 1).

Let’s say you’re starting (almost) from zero and your goal is to be at roughly $80k in MRR in 12 months. If you’re assuming a constant m/m growth rate it looks like this:

Plan #1

The blue line shows the total MRR at the end of the month; the orange bars show the net new MRR added in each month; and the red line shows your monthly growth rate in %. As you can see, you have to add pretty tiny amounts of net new MRR per month until around month 6 in order to reach your goals. Then it goes up quickly, and in the last two months of the year you’ll have to add $20-30k per month. The problem with a plan like this is that if you’re at $8000 after month 6 you think you’re on track, but actually you’ve only achieved 1/10th of what you have to achieve in the year.

You can of course expect that you’re getting better throughout the year as your product matures and as you’re doing more sales and marketing, but I think the slope of plan #1 is too steep. A more helpful and more realistic plan would look like this:

Plan #2

In this version you reach the same result after 12 months, but how you’re getting there is different. In contrast to plan #1, plan #2 doesn’t assume a constant m/m percentage growth rate. It assumes that the amount of net new MRR that you’re adding per month is growing, but on a linear basis. That may make the chart look less exciting, but I believe plan #2 is much more useful. If you use plan #2 and you’re on track after 6 months, it’s much more likely that you will still be on track after month 12.

To sum up, my recommendations for modeling growth:

• In the first 12-24 months or so after launch, plan to get to your target number by assuming a curve similar to the one shown in plan #2.
• After that, start using a m/m or y/y percentage growth target (ideally roughly in line with the T2D3 concept)

As you may have noticed, my recommendations for how you should manage your targets internally are very much aligned with my recommendations for how you should communicate your numbers to investors. Isn’t that nice? :)

[Update 12/12/2015: As a followup to this post, I created a simple (Google Sheets based) calculator which you might find helpful for your planning.]

A closer look at the 6 things to pre-empt 90% of Due Diligence

Since last week's post about 6-7 things to pre-empt 90% of Due Diligence was liked/shared/retweeted quite a bit, I'd like to follow up with some additional details on what exactly SaaS Series A/B investors will look for when you supply them with the data and material that I've mentioned. In my post I suggested that you should prepare a key metrics spreadsheet, a chart with your MRR movements, a cohort analysis, a financial plan, an analysis of your customer acquisition channels and, if you're selling to bigger customers, information about your sales pipeline and details about your largest customers. Let's go through these items one by one and try to anticipate some of the questions potential investors will think about.

As a caveat, I'm going to mention some benchmark numbers but it's very important to note that none of these numbers can be viewed in isolation. There is not one number which will determine if investors want to invest. It's always about many puzzle pieces which together form a picture of the strength of your company.

Key metrics spreadsheet

• What's your visitor-to-signup conversion rate? Typically this metric is in the 1-5% range. If you're significantly below that, that doesn't have to be a red flag – there can be good reasons for a lower rate – but it may raise questions.
• What's your signup-to-paying conversion rate? In my experience, most good SaaS companies convert 5-20% of their trial signups into paying customers (but again, there can be exceptions).
• What's your lead velocity? Are you getting more and more new trials/leads every month?
• What's your account churn rate and more importantly your MRR churn rate? The best SaaS companies have an account churn rate of less than 1.5% per month and a negative MRR churn rate (which doesn't mean that you can't have a great company with somewhat higher churn or that you have to be at negative MRR churn at the time of your Series A/B).
• How fast and how consistently have you been growing MRR? Have you been adding an ever-increasing amount of net new MRR month over month?
• How has your ARPA developed? Have you been able to increase it?
• Are you able to sell annual plans?
• How long did it take you to get to $1M ARR? The best SaaS companies get there within 12-15 months after launch (but again, lots of exceptions ... there are companies that start slowly and skyrocket later).
• How much have you been spending on customer acquisition? As a rule of thumb, most SaaS companies should target a CAC payback time of 6-12 months, although in some cases there can be good reasons to spend significantly more.
• What are your CoGS and what's your Gross Profit Margin? As a pre Series A startup you're probably not great at tracking/attributing CoGS ... which I think is OK.

MRR movements

• How much MRR have you been gaining by acquiring new customers? Have you been able to add MRR by expanding existing accounts as well? 
• How much MRR have you been losing due to churn or downgrades?
• Mamoon Hamid of Social+Capital has coined the term "Quick Ratio" for the ratio between added MRR and lost MRR, and he's looking for companies with a Quick Ratio of > 4. If your Quick Ratio is significantly below that, is it trending in the right direction?

Cohort analysis

• How does your account and MRR retention look like for some of your older customer cohorts? Do you have low or even negative MRR churn?
• Taking a "vertical" look at the cohort analysis, are you getting better and better over time, i.e. do your younger cohorts look better than older ones?
• What's your estimated CLTV based on this cohort data?
• How does usage activity look like on a cohort basis? Is there a lot of "hidden churn" (customers who got inactive and are likely to cancel soon)?

Financial plan

• Is your plan both ambitious and realistic? Most investors are looking for T2D3 type growth, i.e. once you've reached around $1M in ARR you should try to grow 3x y/y for two years.
• Is your plan a coherent continuation of your historic/present numbers, both methodically and with respect to your key assumptions? Projecting a sudden, drastic improvement of your key drivers is understandably much harder to sell to investors.
• Are your key assumptions plausible, and what's the impact of somewhat more pessimistic assumptions?
• Did you sanity check the outcome of your model? If the result of your model is that you'll be a money printing machine within two years, that's usually a sign that you're underestimating future costs. :)

Customer acquisition channels

• How did your customers find you? Organic, paid, both? Ideally you have strong organic growth (which is strong proof of product/market fit) as well as some success with paid customer acquisition channels (which can be scaled more easily).
• How does your conversion funnel look like for different sources of traffic? What are your costs per lead and per customer for different marketing channels?
• How close are you to building a (somewhat) predictable and repeatable sales and marketing machine? Do you have a sense for the scalability of your customer acquisition channels? 

Sales pipeline

• How does your current pipeline look like? Do your short-term targets look realistic based on your "in closing" pipeline? Does your overall pipeline support your mid-term targets?
• How has your pipeline developed? Has it become stronger and stronger over time?
• Are you starting to get a handle on closing probabilities and closing timelines?

In the original post I said as a bonus tip that if you're an enterprise SaaS company, you should put together some additional information about your largest customers. Here's another bonus tip: Include information about your NPS (which is hopefully very high) and how it has developed over time.

Ideally, all these puzzle pieces together, along with the size and attractiveness of the opportunity you're going after and the strength of you and your team, will form the picture of a SaaS startup which has clear product/market fit, enthusiastic customers, strong initial traction, continuously improving metrics and which is on its way to building a repeatable, scalable and profitable customer acquisition engine.

I'm selling my SaaS dashboard and all it costs is a tweet

My financial planning sheet for SaaS startups, my KPI dashboard for SaaS startups and my "9 Horror Worst Practices in SaaS Metrics" slides got a fair bit of popularity lately and two hundred or so people emailed me and requested one of the original Excel files.

That brought me to the idea of selling them. But fear not, I don't want your money, all I want is a tweet. Or a Facebook post. (And if you really want to get one of the files without tweeting, drop me an email and I'll send it to you, although I can't guarantee that it's not bad for your karma.)

So...here are the "pay with a tweet" links:

Financial planning

Dashboard

Worst Practices

Financial planning for SaaS startups

[Update 03/23/16: I've created an improved version of the template - check it out!]

A few people who read my recent post about financial planning asked if I could provide an example for a good financial plan, so I'd like to post one here. The plan is very similar to the one that I created in the very early days at Zendesk and re-used a few times in the meantime, but I had to make a few adjustments to make it more generic.

It's a simple plan for an early-stage SaaS startup with a low-touch sales model – a company which markets a SaaS solution via its website, offers a 30 day free trial, gets most of its trial users organically and through online marketing and converts them into paying customer with very little human interaction. Therefore the key drivers of my imaginary startup are organic growth rate, marketing budget and customer acquisition costs, conversion rate, ARPU and churn rate. If you have a SaaS startup with a higher-touch sales model where revenue growth is largely driven by sales headcount, the plan needs to be modified accordingly.

For non-SaaS business models the template needs to be modified more heavily or may not be useful at all, other than that it shows my way of thinking around business planning. That was one of the points that I was trying to make in the original blog post – you can't simply re-use a template, your financial plan needs to mirror your specific business case.

Here's the plan as a Google spreadsheet. If you want the original Excel version please let me know (yes, Excel is one of the few desktop apps that I'm still using).

[Update: If you'd like to get the original Excel version, which looks a bit nicer, you can download it here. If you like it, tweet it!]

The grey box at the left contains all assumptions (blue text color). Everything on the right is calculated, no hard-coded numbers there. I have, of course, used dummy numbers for all assumptions.

The model should be largely self-explanatory but here are a few notes:

• It all starts with the signups that you're adding. I've separated signups into non-trackable signups (signups that you get from word of mouth, PR and so on) and trackable signups (signups from AdWords and other paid advertising where you can track the costs of acquiring a signup). You may have to break this down further depending on your customer acquisition channels.
• Then I'm assuming that you're converting a certain percentage of signups into paying customers (with a one month time lag, assuming that you have a 30 day free trial). The model contains just one conversion rate regardless of the signup source. You can change that if your conversion rate varies depending on the signup source.
• Next up, I'm calculating revenue by multiplying the (approximate) number of customers that you have mid-month by your average revenue per account. If you have a tiered pricing model or a per-seat pricing, consider modeling that.
• Moving down to the costs side – this should all be self-explanatory. Just replace the dummy values by your actual values or assumptions and add additional expense categories as needed.
• Regarding P&L and cash-flow, I'm keeping things really simple here and am assuming that your EBIT is equal to your operating cash-flow. That is, I'm assuming that you're charging your customers on a monthly basis, that you're not making any investments (in accounting terms) and that there are no taxes or interest payments. I think that simplification works well for most very early-stage SaaS startups but it of course needs to get more sophisticated as you grow.
• Last – but not least because this is one of my favorite parts – the sanity checks: I've seen MANY financial plans with an EBIT margin north of 90% in year 3. That's a classic mistake which can happen if you project your revenues to grow exponentially but don't provision realistic increases on the costs side as well. Adding some sanity checks will help you spot these mistakes and make sure that your plan remains realistic. For example, I've included the number of paying customers which each support agent needs to take care of. If that number gets too high you need to allow for more support staff.

Avoiding Parkinson's Law of Triviality in your financial plan

In the last few years I've seen a lot of financial plans, and since we started Point Nine in the middle of last year that volume has been skyrocketing. I've seen everything from just a few numbers in an email to extremely sophisticated Excel spreadsheets with dozens of tabs and tens of thousands of cells, and I thought I'd offer some advice on what I think a good financial plan looks like.

To begin with, among the worst financial plans are those that you get if you take a template from a business plan competition or a bank in Germany and don't customize it to your particular business. These templates are usually very detailed on the costs side, listing everything from magazine subscriptions to stationary and postage, but the revenue projection is just one line – a pure estimate that is coming out of nowhere. Parkinson's Law of Triviality comes to mind!

The best financial plans of early-stage Internet startups in my opinion:

• are relatively simple – just one Excel tab or a few at most (a later-stage company will often require a more complex plan but in the beginning you can keep it simple)
• are based on the key drivers of your business (your conversion funnel, your projected ARPU, churn etc.)
• make your assumptions transparent and easy to change
• contain very few hard-coded numbers which would make the plan hard to revise (an exception to this are historic numbers, of course)
• avoid Parkinson's Law of Triviality – spend more effort on what really matters and lump together stuff like tiny expense categories
• contain a few extra lines for sanity checks (anyone who will seriously review your plan will perform them anyway, so why not make their lives a little easier?)

If anyone is interested in further details, please let me know in the comments section, email me or send me a tweet and I can add some more color and post an example.