User manual
Palo Alto Software LivePlan

User Manual for Palo Alto Software LivePlan

• Product category: Home & Office Palo Alto Software
• Brand: Palo Alto Software
• Description and content of package
• Technical information and basic settings
• Frequently asked questions – FAQ
• Troubleshooting (does not switch on, does not respond, error message, what do I do if...)
• Authorized service for Palo Alto Software Home & Office

Product description

Easy Financials

Easy, Error-Free Financials
• LivePlan makes it easy to put together your financial projections. Your knowledge about your business combined with LivePlan's forecasting tools will help create a bulletproof business plan.

Built-in Formulas Make the Financials Simple
• Write your whole plan without ever having to look at a spreadsheet. LivePlan simply asks you questions about your business and you plug in the answers. The calculations are done behind the scenes. With a combined 50 years of experience creating business plans and business planning software, you can trust the people at LivePlan to do the math for you.

Illustrate Your Financials with Automatic Charts
• Visuals make your plan easier to digest, so LivePlan creates your charts based on the financial information you've already input. LivePlan's automatic charts will help make your plan look professional and save you time.

Full Financials for a Complete Business Plan
• LivePlan includes all the financial tables a lender or investor expects to see, all linked together for you. You input your data and it's pulled into the right table automatically.

Compare Your Plan to Companies Just Like Yours
• LivePlan creates an automatic report of your key business numbers and compare them to industry averages from companies similar to yours. It explains each number and how to improve yours. When you're up and running, you can also compare your actual performance against the performance of similar companies so you know exactly what you need to do to grow your business.

Include Just the Information You Need
• You have complete control over your plan. Maybe you only need to forecast sales along with expenses and don't want to worry about cash flow right now. Or maybe you want multiple years' worth of monthly data. With a few simple settings, you can easily choose the level of detail to include in your plan. Moreover, you can always go back and change it to adjust your plan for any audience.

Create a Long-Term Plan
• A typical business plan looks three years into the future, but if you need a longer-range plan it's simple to create one. LivePlan lets you include five full years of projections, which you can include in your appendix, so you can show investors or lenders exactly how your business will grow.

Build Your Plan for Your National Market
• No matter what country you live in, you can use LivePlan to write your business plan. You can set your income tax rates (GST, VAT, Sales tax) to your national rate. You can also set the currency to reflect your national currency. Furthermore, you can update your tax rates and currency at any time during your plan if required.

Professional Plans

Top-Notch Printed Documents
• LivePlan produces professional, printed plans that will impress virtually any audience. Simply download your plan as a PDF to print or share, or export it to your favorite word processing program to give it some final polish. Your business plan will look like it was created by a professional business plan writer.

The Format Lenders Expect
• Banks, investors, and SBA-approved lenders view many business plans. If yours doesn't fit the standard format, you might get stuck at the bottom of the pile. After 15+ years in the business planning business, the people at LivePlan know what lenders are looking for in a business plan to meet those standards.

10 Document Themes
• The included 10 professional designs help your plan stand out to lenders, investors, and in business plan competitions.

Export to Microsoft Word
• With one click, you can export your plan to Microsoft Word to add a flashy cover page or images of your products.

Personalized Plan for Your Business
• Businesses come in all shapes and sizes, and so do business plans. That's why LivePlan makes it easy for you to add, subtract, rename, and rearrange the components of your plan to suit your particular situation. Far from a cookie-cutter business plan, you'll create a unique plan that's just right for your business.

Samples and Examples

Over 500 Sample Plans Included
• The 500 sample plans were mostly collected through generous donations from happy customers over the past 15 years who used the software and wanted to share their successful plans with others.

Example Content Included
• LivePlan also includes example content for every text item in your business plan. For instance, browse through a few examples to get an idea how others have worded their Executive Summary. When you find an example that works, you can add it right into your plan with one click. Then personalize it to fit your business and move on to the next task.

Build Your Pitch

Build a One-Page Pitch
• Quickly and easily build a one-page infographic that visually represents your business opportunity. Share your professional pitch page with lenders, investors, business partners, or advisers and tell the story of your business.
  
  Your pitch will allow you to highlight:
  • Company summary
  • Market problem
  • Solution
  • Sales channels
  • Marketing activities
  • Target market and segmentation
  • Market size
  • Competitors
  • Competitive advantage
  • Funding needs
  • Big picture financial projections
  • Key milestones
  • Team members and advisers

Refine Your Business Model
• The LivePlan Pitch feature is a core tenet of LivePlan's Lean Planning methodology that combines elements of the Lean Startup movement and the best parts of the traditional business planning process.
  
  Lean Planning encourages early-stage startups to stay nimble and adaptive by building a business model and a financial forecast that can be easily measured, tracked, and refined. The LivePlan Pitch helps startups refine a business model quickly and easily as you validate core assumptions.

Make Your 60-Seconds Count
• You've probably heard of an elevator pitch, but do you have one? The LivePlan Pitch helps you communicate the value of your business in as little as 60 seconds. It's the easiest way to highlight the most important parts of your business on a single page.

Share Your Pitch and Get Noticed
• Your business is unique, so why not share your business opportunity in a unique format. You can easily share a customized web link that LivePlan provides for you, or invite others to view your pitch in your LivePlan account via a secure login.

Guidance

Guidance at Every Step
• LivePlan provides lots of built-in guidance such as video instructions from renowned business planning expert Tim Berry. You might not be familiar with his name, but Tim literally wrote the book on business planning (The Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan) and it's included with your purchase. Without having to pay consulting fees, you get the peace of mind and the professional plan that you'd expect from working with a planning consultant.

Easy-to-Follow Instructions
• LivePlan is packed with easy-to-follow instructions, helpful advice, and additional reading. You get to focus on what you know best - your business - while LivePlan provides the support you need to turn your great ideas into a great business plan.

Comparison with Other Businesses
• Before you take your plan to the bank, LivePlan compares your numbers to other businesses in your industry and your location to make sure you're on track. It tells you exactly where you might have a problem and exactly how to fix it.

The Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan
• The PDF version of The Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan is included with LivePlan. It details Tim Berry's no-nonsense approach to business planning, helping you break away from cookie-cutter business plans to embrace an easier and more practical plan that will evolve with your business.

Video Instructions and Tutorials
• Create the best possible plan for your business by watching Tim Berry's planning tutorials. Originally created for the Small Business Administration, the tutorials break planning into manageable pieces and help you understand the principles behind the process.

Legal Advice and Forms
• From choosing a legal structure to understanding trademark basics to a collection of ready-to-use legal forms, LivePlan includes additional resources to help you succeed.

Marketing Expertise
• You'll find lots of helpful marketing tips and guidance built right into LivePlan, including a valuable ebook from John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing fame.

Access Anywhere

Online Access
• Regardless of where you are or which computer you're using, LivePlan is there. When you want to work on your business plan, log in from any Internet connected device that can run Internet Explorer, Safari, FireFox, or Chrome.

Mac and Windows Compatible
• It doesn't matter if you use a PC at the office and a Mac at home, or both. You can access LivePlan on any and all the computers you own or work on, including your iPad. It's the beauty of online business planning software - it works on any computer, everywhere there's an Internet connection.

Team up with Colleagues
• Because your business plan is online, you and your partners can work on your plan from anywhere.

Team Collaboration

Easy Collaboration
• No more emailing files back and forth or losing one person's changes because you accidentally saved over them. LivePlan makes business planning a team activity by providing a flexible software license that lets you collaborate with your partner or team.

Choose Who Sees What
• If have several versions of your business plan, or multiple partners and multiple different plans, it's easy to manage permissions. Allow specific collaborators to see and work on only the plans you want them to see. The plan owner decides who can access what on a plan-by-plan basis.

Get Comments and Advice from Team Members
• You don't have to give somebody access to edit your plan to get their insights. Invited users can comment on any section of a plan. You get feedback that you can implement or ignore, without worrying about somebody actually changing the work you've done.

Share with Advisors and Investors
• Say you want advice from your accountant. Give your accountant instant access by inviting him or her right from your laptop or even your smartphone. You can also invite unlimited readers to view your plan. Additionally, you can take access away from any guest, at any time.

Progress Tracking

Track Progress
• Once you've forecast your revenue goals and created a budget for your business, the next step is track your progress towards those goals. LivePlan connects to your QuickBooks or Xero accounting data so you can see how your actual performance matches up with your expectations. Get instant updates and insights you need to stay on track with your financial plan.

Make Better Decisions
• LivePlan gives you easy-to-understand insights for your key business numbers so you know what you need to do to grow your business. Do you need to charge more? Should you collect money faster? How are your profits? LivePlan makes those decisions easy.

Know How You Stack Up Against the Competition
• With LivePlan, you can see at-a-glance how you compare to companies just like yours. Enter in your industry and location, and LivePlan will tell you if you're doing better or worse than your competition and how you can improve.

Plan and Forecast in Real-Time
• The Scoreboard empowers you to quickly and easily maximize profit centers within your business, identify and correct loss centers, and adjust payables and receivables (e.g., payment schedules, contract terms) in order to improve your business' overall financial performance.

Painless Reporting
• Comparing your sales and expenses to your budget, last month's performance, and last year's data is a time consuming and frustrating process. LivePlan lets you skip the spreadsheets and hard-to-read reports from your accounting system. Instead, you get useful reports that will help grow your business and share with your business partners, investors, and other advisers.

Access Key QuickBooks or Xero Data
• If your company uses QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks for Windows, or Xero, you probably know what a hassle it is to get at that valuable data. With LivePlan, you can bring your QuickBooks or Xero data automatically into the Scoreboard and see how your business is doing from any computer with Internet access.

Safe and Secure

Confidentiality Guaranteed
• The people at LivePlan understand how important your personal information is to you and they are committed to keeping it strictly confidential. They will never sell, rent, or otherwise abuse your private information.

Ironclad Security
• LivePlan uses the same security and safety measures as the world's top financial institutions and undergo regular security audits to ensure that the service is as safe as it can possibly be, at all times. All account and plan data is written to multiple disks instantly, backed up daily, and stored in multiple locations. The servers utilize modern techniques to remove bottlenecks and points of failure.

Automatic Saving and Backups
• Your plan is saved automatically every few seconds so you don't have to worry about losing data.

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