LivePlan

LivePlan builds business plans and financial forecasts, with the stated aim of producing a plan grounded in facts rather than guesses and ready to put in front of a funder. It imports accounting data rather than requiring manual entry, and higher tiers add market research, scenario modelling and deeper financial analysis. An expert service is sold as an optional add-on.

Importing the accounting data is what separates a forecast from a spreadsheet exercise. A plan that starts from actual revenue and cost history can be compared against performance as the year runs, which turns the document from something written once for a lender into something a business uses.

The funder audience shapes the output deliberately. Lenders and investors expect a particular structure and a particular set of statements, and producing that format reliably is worth more to a borrower than flexibility, because a plan rejected on presentation never reaches its content.

Scenario modelling is the capability worth paying up for and the one to test first. A single forecast is a guess with a decimal point; two or three scenarios with different assumptions is a description of the actual range a business is operating in, which is what a lender is really assessing when it reads the numbers.