How to create a financial forecast for a cocoa butter wholesaler?

Creating a financial forecast for your cocoa butter wholesaler, 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 cocoa butter wholesaler 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 cocoa butter wholesaler?

In order to prosper, your business needs to have visibility on what lies ahead and the right financial resources to grow. This is where having a financial forecast for your cocoa butter wholesaler becomes handy.

Creating a cocoa butter wholesaler financial forecast forces you to take stock of where your business stands and where you want it to go. 

Once you have clarity on the destination, you will need to draw up a plan to get there and assess what it means in terms of future profitability and cash flows for your cocoa butter wholesaler.

Having this clear plan in place will give you the confidence needed to move forward with your business’s development. 

Having an up-to-date financial forecast for a cocoa butter wholesaler is also useful if your trading environment worsens, as the forecast enables you to adjust to your new market conditions and anticipate any potential cash shortfall. 

Finally, your cocoa butter wholesaler's financial projections will also help you secure financing, as banks and investors alike will want to see accurate projections before agreeing to finance your business.

What information is needed to build a cocoa butter wholesaler financial forecast?

The quality of your inputs is key when it comes to financial modelling: no matter how good the model is, if your inputs are off, so will the forecast.

If you are building a financial plan to start a cocoa butter wholesaler, you will need to have done your market research and have a clear picture of your sales and marketing strategies so that you can project revenues with confidence.

You will also need to have a clear idea of what resources will be required to operate the cocoa butter wholesaler on a daily basis, and to have done your research with regard to the equipment needed to launch your venture (see further down this guide). 

If you are creating a financial forecast of an existing cocoa butter wholesaler, things are usually simpler as you will be able to use your historical accounting data as a budgeting base, and complement that with your team’s view on what lies ahead for the years to come.

Let's now zoom in on what will go in your cocoa butter wholesaler's financial forecast.

The sales forecast for a cocoa butter wholesaler

From experience, it is usually best to start creating your cocoa butter wholesaler financial forecast by your sales forecast.

To create an accurate sales forecast for your cocoa butter wholesaler, you will have to rely on the data collected in your market research, or if you're running an existing cocoa butter wholesaler, the historical data of the business, to estimate two key variables: 

• The average price 
• The number of monthly transactions

To get there, you will need to consider the following factors:

Once you have an idea of what your future sales will look like, it will be time to work on your overhead budget. Let’s see what this entails.

The operating expenses for a cocoa butter wholesaler

The next step is to estimate the costs you’ll have to incur to operate your cocoa butter wholesaler.

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

But your cocoa butter wholesaler'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 cocoa butter wholesaler's specific circumstances.

What investments are needed to start or grow a cocoa butter wholesaler?

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

For a cocoa butter wholesaler, capital expenditures and initial working capital items could include:

Again, this list will need to be adjusted according to the specificities of your cocoa butter wholesaler.

The financing plan of your cocoa butter wholesaler

The next step in the creation of your financial forecast for your cocoa butter wholesaler 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 cocoa butter wholesaler?

Now let's have a look at the main output tables of your cocoa butter wholesaler's financial forecast.

The projected profit & loss statement

The projected profit & loss shows how profitable your cocoa butter wholesaler is likely to be in the years to come.

For your cocoa butter wholesaler 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 cocoa butter wholesalers, there is some leniency for startups which will have numbers that will look a bit different than existing businesses.

The projected balance sheet

Your cocoa butter wholesaler'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 cash flow forecast

Your cocoa butter wholesaler'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 cocoa butter wholesaler:

• 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 cocoa butter wholesaler'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 cocoa butter wholesaler'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 cocoa butter wholesaler's financial forecast?

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

Using online financial projection software to build your cocoa butter wholesaler's forecast

The modern and easiest way to build a forecast is to use professional financial projection software 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 forecasting 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 cocoa butter wholesaler 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 cocoa butter wholesaler'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 cocoa butter wholesaler 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 cocoa butter wholesaler'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 forecast templates for inspiration

The Business Plan Shop has dozens of financial forecast examples available.

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

Our templates are a great source of inspiration, whether you just want to see what a complete business plan looks like, or are looking for concrete examples of how you should model financial elements in your own forecast.

Takeaways

1. A financial forecast shows expected growth, profitability, and cash generation metrics for your cocoa butter wholesaler.
2. Tracking actuals vs. forecast and having an up-to-date financial forecast is key to maintaining visibility on your future cash flows.
3. Using financial forecasting software is the modern way of creating and maintaining financial projections.

We hope that this guide helped you gain a clearer perspective on the steps needed to create the financial forecast for a cocoa butter wholesaler. Don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions!

Also on The Business Plan Shop

• Financial forecast example
• How to project sales for a business?
• Financial forecast template for a business idea

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