How to create a financial forecast for a cat breeding company?

Developing and maintaining an up-to-date financial forecast for your cat breeding company is key in order to maintain visibility on your business’s future cash flows. 

If you feel overwhelmed at the thought of putting together a cat breeding company financial forecast then don’t worry as this guide is here to help you.

We'll cover everything from: the main objectives of a financial forecast, the data you need to gather before starting, to the tables that compose it, and the tools that will help you create and maintain your forecast efficiently.

Let's get started!

Why create and maintain a financial forecast for a cat breeding company?

Creating and maintaining an up-to-date financial forecast is the only way to steer the development of your cat breeding company and ensure that it can be financially viable in the years to come.

A financial plan for a cat breeding company enables you to look at your business in detail - from income to operating costs and investments - to evaluate its expected profitability and future cash flows.

This gives you the visibility needed to plan future investments and expansion with confidence. 

And, when your trading environment gets tougher, having an up to date cat breeding company forecast enables you to detect potential upcoming financing shortfalls in advance, enabling you to make adjustments or secure financing before you run out of cash.

It’s also important to remember that your cat breeding company's financial forecast will be essential when looking for financing. You can be 100% certain that banks and investors will ask to see your numbers, so make sure they’re set out accurately and attractively.

What information is used as input to build a cat breeding company financial forecast?

A cat breeding company's financial forecast is only as good as the inputs used to build it.  

If you are creating (or updating) the forecast of an existing cat breeding company, then you mostly need your accounting information, key historical operating non-financial data, and your team’s input on what to expect for the coming years.

If you are building financial projections for a cat breeding company startup, you will need to have done your research and have a clear picture of your competitive environment and go-to-market strategy so that you can forecast sales accurately.

For a new venture, you will also need a precise list of the resources needed to keep the cat breeding company running on a day-to-day basis and a list of the equipment and expenditures required to start the business (more on that later). 

Let's now take a closer look at the elements that make up your cat breeding company's financial forecast.

The sales forecast for a cat breeding company

From experience, it usually makes sense to start your cat breeding company's financial projection with the revenues forecast.

The inputs used to forecast your sales will include the historical trading data of your cat breeding company (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 cat breeding company'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 cat breeding company

Once you know what level of sales you can expect, you can start budgeting the expenses required to operate your cat breeding company on a daily basis.

Expenses normally vary based on how much revenue you anticipate (which is why, from experience, it is always better to start your forecast with the topline projection), and where your business is based. 

Operating expenses for a cat breeding company will include some of the following items:

This list will need to be tailored to the specificities of your cat breeding company, but should offer a good starting point for your budget.

What investments are needed to start or grow a cat breeding company?

Creating and expanding a cat breeding company also requires investments which you need to factor into your financial forecast.

Capital expenditures and initial working capital items for a cat breeding company could include elements such as:

Again, this list is not exhaustive and will need to be adjusted according to the circumstances of your cat breeding company.

The financing plan of your cat breeding company

The next step in the creation of your financial forecast for your cat breeding company 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 cat breeding company?

Now let's have a look at the main output tables of your cat breeding company's financial forecast.

The profit & loss forecast

The forecasted profit & loss statement will enable you to visualise your cat breeding company's expected growth and profitability over the next three to five years.

A financially viable P&L statement for a cat breeding company should normally show:

• Sales growing above inflation
• Stable or expanding (ideally) profit margins
• A net profit

This will of course depend on the stage of your business: a new venture might be loss-making until it reaches its breakeven point in year 2 or 3, for example.

The projected balance sheet

The projected balance sheet gives an overview of your cat breeding company's financial structure at the end of the financial year.

It is composed of three categories of items: assets, liabilities and equity:

• Assets: are what the business possesses and uses to produce cash flows. It includes resources such as cash, buildings, equipment, and accounts receivable (money owed by clients).
• Liabilities: are the debts of your cat breeding company. They include accounts payable (money owed to suppliers), taxes due and bank loans.
• Equity: is the combination of what has been invested by the business owners and the cumulative profits to date (which are called retained earnings). Equity is a proxy for the value of the owner's stake in the business.

The cash flow forecast

Your cat breeding company's cash flow forecast shows how much cash your business is expected to consume or generate in the years to come.

It is best practice to organise the cash flow forecast by nature to better explain where cash is used or generated by the cat breeding company:

• Operating cash flow: shows how much cash is generated by the operating activities
• Investing cash flow: shows how much will be invested in capital expenditure to maintain or expand the business 
• Financing cash flow: shows if the business is raising new capital or repaying financiers (debt repayment, dividends)

Keeping an eye on (and regularly updating) your cat breeding company's cash flow forecast is key to ensuring that your business has sufficient liquidity to operate normally and to detect financing requirements as early as possible.

If you are trying to raise capital, you will normally be asked to provide a monthly cash flow forecast in your cat breeding company's financial plan - so that banks or investors can assess seasonal variation and ensure your business is appropriately capitalised.

Which tool should you use to create your cat breeding company's financial forecast?

Creating your cat breeding company's financial forecast may sound fairly daunting, but the good news is that there are several ways to go about it.

Using online financial forecasting software to build your cat breeding company'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.

Hiring a financial consultant or chartered accountant

Hiring a consultant or chartered accountant is also an efficient way to get a professional cat breeding company financial projection.

As you can imagine, this solution is much more expensive than using software. From experience, the creation of a simple financial forecast over three years (including a balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement) is likely to start around £700 or $1,000 excluding taxes.

The indicative estimate above, is for a small business, and a forecast done as a one-off. Using a financial consultant or accountant to track your actuals vs. forecast and to keep your financial forecast up to date on a monthly or quarterly basis will naturally cost a lot more.

If you choose this solution, make sure your service provider has first-hand experience in your industry, so that they may challenge your assumptions and offer insights (as opposed to just taking your figures at face value to create the forecast’s financial statements).

Why not use a spreadsheet such as Excel or Google Sheets to build your cat breeding company'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 cat breeding company 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 cat breeding company'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 forecast templates available.

Our examples contain a complete business plan with a financial forecast and a written presentation of the company, the team, the strategy, and the medium-term objectives.

Whether you are just starting out or already have your own cat breeding company, looking at our financial forecast template is a good way to:

• Understand what a complete business plan should look like
• Understand how you should model financial items for your cat breeding company

Takeaways

1. Having a financial forecast enables you to visualise the 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 projections up-to-date is the only way to get a view on what your cat breeding company future cash flows may look like.
3. Using financial forecasting software is the mordern and easy way to create and maintain your forecasts.

This is the end of our guide on how to build the financial forecast for a cat breeding company, we hope you found it useful. Don't hesitate to contact us if you want to share your feedback or have any questions.

Also on The Business Plan Shop

• Example of financial forecast
• How to project sales for a business?
• Financial forecast template for a business idea

Know someone who owns or is thinking of starting a cat breeding company? Share our forecasting guide with them!