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Corporate finance:
Business planning and forecasting

Successful businesses plan to succeed. A business plan is not something you produce to please the bank or because you need it for Investors in People. It is an essential management tool. It should be your business plan, not ours, but we can provide all the skills and experience you need to help you produce it and monitor its implementation.

We will help you to analyse your business. We will guide you through a definition of your company's objectives. Maybe we will advise you to prepare a SWOT analysis (a succinct summary of your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) or a PEST analysis (a brief consideration of how Political, Economic, Social, or Technological factors may affect your business).

The high level thinking then needs to be drilled down into detailed plans. Each department must do its own part in fulfilling the company's objectives, and ideally each departmental manager should "own" his or her part of the plan. Depending on the organisational structure of your business, a typical departmental breakdown will involve separate plans for buying, production, marketing, sales, human resources, and finance. The plan should then be formally documented. The discipline of documenting it will help ensure that the different parts of the plan come together into a coherent whole.

We will ensure that your plan is subjected to the rigour of being SMART:

Specific - it is an action plan, so no woolly thinking is allowed.

Measurable - you must be able to define measurable outcomes, or you have no means of monitoring progress.

Attainable - by all means set challenging targets but an action plan should be realistic not fanciful.

Resourced - there may be many limiting factors, such as management time, premises, manufacturing capacity, people, or finance.

Time-framed - milestones (or deadlines) focus people's minds and enable progress to be measured.

Lastly, the plan should be translated into a financial forecast, showing monthly profit and loss, cash flow, and balance sheets. This is a key document, facilitating comparison between planned and actual outcomes and enabling you to respond to variations from your plan. As you would expect, Cassons use the best software there is, not only to produce your financial forecasts but also to compare them with actual outcomes and to revise them as appropriate. In fact, we sell the software and we can train you to use it, so that you have forecasting power and expertise at your direct command.