How to create a financial forecast for a bookbinding workshop?

Creating a financial forecast for your bookbinding workshop, and ensuring it stays up to date, is the only way to maintain visibility on future cash flows. 

This might sound complex, but with the right guidance and tools, creating an accurate financial forecast for your bookbinding workshop is not that hard.

In this guide, we'll cover everything from the main goal of a financial projection, the data you need as input, to the tables that compose it, and the tools that can help you build a forecast efficiently.

Without further ado, let us begin!

Why create and maintain a financial forecast for a bookbinding workshop?

The financial projections for your bookbinding workshop act as a financial blueprint to guide its growth with confidence and ensure its long-term financial viability. 

To create them, you will need to look at your business in detail - from sales to operating costs and investments - to assess how much profit it can generate in the years to come and what will be the associated cash flows.

During challenging market conditions, maintaining an up-to-date financial forecast enables early detection of potential financial shortfalls, allowing for timely adjustments or securing financing before facing a cash crisis. 

Your bookbinding workshop's financial forecast will also prove invaluable when seeking financing. Banks and investors will undoubtedly request a thorough examination of your financial figures, making precision and presentation essential.

What information is used as input to build a bookbinding workshop financial forecast?

A bookbinding workshop's financial forecast needs to be built on the right foundation: your assumptions. 

The data required to create your assumptions will depend on whether you are a new or existing bookbinding workshop.

If you are creating (or updating) the forecast of an existing bookbinding workshop, then your main inputs will be historical accounting data and operating metrics, and your team’s view on what to expect for the next three to five years.

If you are building financial projections for a new bookbinding workshop startup, you will need to rely on market research to form your go-to-market strategy and derive your sales forecast.

For a new venture, you will also need an itemised list of resources needed for the bookbinding workshop to operate, along with a list of equipment required to launch the venture (more on that below). 

Now that you understand what is needed, let’s have a look at what elements will make up your bookbinding workshop's financial forecast.

The sales forecast for a bookbinding workshop

From experience, it usually makes sense to start your bookbinding workshop's financial projection with the revenues forecast.

The inputs used to forecast your sales will include the historical trading data of your bookbinding workshop (which can be used as a starting point for existing businesses) and the data collected in your market research (which both new ventures and existing businesses need to project their sales forward).

Your bookbinding workshop's sales forecast can be broken down into two key estimates: 

• The average price 
• The number of monthly transactions

To assess these variables accurately, you will need to consider the following factors:

Once you have a sales forecast in place, the next step will be to work on your overhead budget. Let’s have a look at that now. 

The operating expenses for a bookbinding workshop

The next step is to estimate the costs you’ll have to incur to operate your bookbinding workshop.

These will vary based on where your business is located, and its overall size (level of sales, personnel, etc.). 

But your bookbinding workshop's operating expenses should normally include the following items:

This list is not exhaustive by any means, and will need to be tailored to your bookbinding workshop's specific circumstances.

What investments are needed to start or grow a bookbinding workshop?

Once you have an idea of how much sales you could achieve and what it will cost to run your bookbinding workshop, it is time to look into the equipment required to launch or expand the activity.

For a bookbinding workshop, capital expenditures and initial working capital items could include:

Again, this list will need to be adjusted according to the specificities of your bookbinding workshop.

The financing plan of your bookbinding workshop

The next step in the creation of your financial forecast for your bookbinding workshop is to think about how you might finance your business.

You will have to assess how much capital will come from shareholders (equity) and how much can be secured through banks.

Bank loans will have to be modelled so that you can separate the interest expenses from the repayments of principal, and include all this data in your forecast.

Issuing share capital and obtaining a bank loan are two of the most common ways that entrepreneurs finance their businesses.

What tables compose the financial plan for a bookbinding workshop?

Now let's have a look at the main output tables of your bookbinding workshop's financial forecast.

The projected profit & loss statement

The projected profit & loss shows how profitable your bookbinding workshop is likely to be in the years to come.

For your bookbinding workshop to be financially viable, your projected P&L should ideally show:

• Sales growing above inflation (the higher the better)
• Profit margins which are stable or expanding (the higher the better) 
• A net profit at the end of each financial year (the higher the better)

This is for established bookbinding workshops, there is some leniency for startups which will have numbers that will look a bit different than existing businesses.

The projected balance sheet

Your bookbinding workshop's projected balance sheet provides a snapshot of your business’s financial position at year-end.

It is composed of three types of elements: assets, liabilities and equity:

• Assets: represent what the business possesses including cash, equipment, and accounts receivable (money owed by clients).
• Liabilities: represent funds advanced to the business by lenders and other creditors. They include accounts payable (money owed to suppliers), taxes payable and loans from banks and financial institutions.
• Equity: is the combination of what has been invested by the business owners and the cumulative profits and losses generated by the business to date (which are called retained earnings). Equity is a proxy for the value of the owner's stake in the business.

The projected cash flow statement

A projected cash flow statement for a bookbinding workshop is used to show how much cash the business is generating or consuming.

The cash flow forecast is usually organised by nature to show three key metrics:

• The operating cash flow: do the core business activities generate or consume cash?
• The investing cash flow: how much is the business investing in long-term assets (this is usually compared to the level of fixed assets on the balance sheet to assess whether the business is regularly maintaining and renewing its equipment)?
• The financing cash flow: is the business raising new financing or repaying financiers (debt repayment, dividends)?

Cash is king and keeping an eye on future cash flows is imperative for running a successful business. Therefore, you should pay close attention to your bookbinding workshop's cash flow forecast.

If you are trying to secure financing, note that it is customary to provide both yearly and monthly cash flow forecasts in a financial plan - so that the reader can analyze seasonal variation and ensure the bookbinding workshop is appropriately capitalised.

Which tool should you use to create your bookbinding workshop's financial forecast?

Using the right tool or solution will make the creation of your bookbinding workshop's financial forecast much easier than it sounds. Let’s explore the main options.

Using online financial forecasting software to build your bookbinding workshop's projections

The modern and easiest way is to use an online financial forecasting tool such as the one we offer at The Business Plan Shop.

There are several advantages to using specialised software:

• You can easily create your financial forecast by letting the software take care of the financial calculations for you without errors
• You have access to complete financial forecast templates
• You get a complete financial forecast ready to be sent to your bank or investors
• You can easily track your actual financial performance against your financial forecast, and recalibrate your forecast as the year goes by
• You can create scenarios to stress test your forecast's main assumptions
• You can easily update your forecast as time goes by to maintain visibility on future cash flows
• You have a friendly support team on standby to assist you when you are stuck
• It’s cost-efficient and much cheaper than using an accountant or consultant (see below)

If you are interested in this type of solution, you can try our projection software for free by signing up here.

Calling in a financial consultant or chartered accountant

Outsourcing the creation of your bookbinding workshop financial forecast is another possible solution.

This will cost more than using software as you can expect as your price will have to cover the accountant’s time, software cost, and profit margin.

Price can vary greatly based on the complexity of your business. For a small business, from experience, a simple three-year financial forecast (including a balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement) will start at around £700 or $1,000. 

Bear in mind that this is for forecasts produced at a single point in time, updating or tracking your forecast against actuals will cost extra. 

If you decide to outsource your forecasting:

• Make sure the professional has direct experience in your industry and is able to challenge your assumptions constructively. 
• Steer away from consultants using sectorial ratios to build their client’s financial forecasts (these projections are worthless for a small business).

Why not use a spreadsheet such as Excel or Google Sheets to build your bookbinding workshop's financial forecast?

You and your financial partners need numbers you can trust. Unless you have studied finance or accounting, creating a trustworthy and error-free bookbinding workshop financial forecast on a spreadsheet is likely to prove challenging.

Financial modelling is very technical by nature and requires a solid grasp of accounting principles to be done without errors. This means that using spreadsheet software like Excel or Google Sheets to create accurate financial forecasts is out of reach for most business owners.

Creating forecasts in Excel is also inefficient nowadays:

• Software has advanced to the point where forecasting can be done much faster and more accurately than manually on a spreadsheet.
• With artificial intelligence, the software is capable of detecting mistakes and helping decision-making.

Spreadsheets are versatile tools but they are not tailor-made for reporting. Importing your bookbinding workshop's accounting data in Excel to track actual vs. forecast is incredibly manual and tedious (and so is keeping forecasts up to date). It is much faster to use dedicated financial planning tools like The Business Plan Shop which are built specially for this.

Use our financial projection templates for inspiration

The Business Plan Shop has dozens of financial forecasting templates available.

Our examples contain both the financial forecast, and a written business plan which presents, in detail, the company, the team, the strategy, and the medium-term objectives.

Whether you are just starting out or already have your own bookbinding workshop, looking at our template is always a good way to get ideas on how to model financial items and what to write when creating a business plan to secure funding.

Takeaways

1. A financial projection shows expected growth, profitability, and cash generation for your business over the next three to five years.
2. Tracking actuals vs. forecast and keeping your financial forecast up-to-date is the only way to maintain visibility on future cash flows.
3. Using financial forecasting software makes it easy to create and maintain up-to-date projections for your bookbinding workshop.

You have reached the end of our guide. We hope you now have a better understanding of how to create a financial forecast for a bookbinding workshop. Don't hesitate to contact our team if you have any questions or want to share your experience building forecasts!

Also on The Business Plan Shop

• Example of financial projections
• How to project sales for a business?
• Sample financial forecast for business idea

Know someone who runs or wants to start a bookbinding workshop? Share our financial projection guide with them!