Startup founders as well as company owners or managers who need to produce a business plan, normally face the challenge that they want to calculate the break even point or future profits of their company, project or startup. For this they typically take Excel, they are setting a price for their product, trying to make some estimates about the revenue and then about their costs.

However, in many cases they get stuck when some more detailed planning becomes necessary. And very fast, the Excel sheet will become very complex and difficult to handle, especially when it comes down to planning the development of customer bases, subscription models, variable costs, marketing costs and results, or network effects.

There exist a number of competing business plan solutions. Most, if not all, suffer from the principal drawback, that they are trying to plan individual positions from the Balance Sheet or from the Income Statement directly. However, this approach is flawed in my opinion. One needs to plan customers and transactions from customers first and derive Income Statement positions such as revenue or costs from there. This is the only proper way.