How to create a financial forecast for a Georgian restaurant?

Creating a financial forecast for your Georgian restaurant, 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 Georgian restaurant 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 Georgian restaurant?

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 Georgian restaurant becomes handy.

Creating a Georgian restaurant 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 Georgian restaurant.

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 Georgian restaurant 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 Georgian restaurant'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 used as input to build a Georgian restaurant financial forecast?

A Georgian restaurant'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 Georgian restaurant.

If you are creating (or updating) the forecast of an existing Georgian restaurant, 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 Georgian restaurant 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 Georgian restaurant 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 Georgian restaurant's financial forecast.

The sales forecast for a Georgian restaurant

The sales forecast, also called topline projection, is normally where you will start when building your Georgian restaurant financial forecast.

Creating a coherent sales projection boils down to estimating two key drivers:

• The average price 
• The number of monthly transactions

To do this, you will need to rely on historical data (for an existing business), market research data (for both new and existing Georgian restaurants), and consider the elements below:

After the sales forecast comes the operating expenses budget, which we will now look into in more detail.

The operating expenses for a Georgian restaurant

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

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

But your Georgian restaurant'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 Georgian restaurant's specific circumstances.

What investments are needed to start or grow a Georgian restaurant?

Creating and expanding a Georgian restaurant also requires investments which you need to factor into your financial forecast.

Capital expenditures and initial working capital items for a Georgian restaurant could include elements such as:

Again, this list is not exhaustive and will need to be adjusted according to the circumstances of your Georgian restaurant.

The financing plan of your Georgian restaurant

The next step in the creation of your financial forecast for your Georgian restaurant 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 Georgian restaurant?

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

The forecasted profit & loss statement

The profit & loss forecast gives you a clear picture of your business’ expected growth over the first three to five years, and whether it’s likely to be profitable or not.

A healthy Georgian restaurant's P&L statement should show:

• Sales growing at (minimum) or above (better) inflation
• Stable (minimum) or expanding (better) profit margins
• A healthy level of net profitability

This will of course depend on the stage of your business: numbers for an established Georgian restaurant will look different than for a startup.

The projected balance sheet

Your Georgian restaurant's forecasted balance sheet enables you to assess your financial structure and working capital requirements.

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

• Assets: represent what the business owns and uses to produce cash flows. It includes resources such as cash, equipment, and accounts receivable (money owed by clients).
• Liabilities: represent funds advanced to the business by lenders and other creditors. It includes items such as accounts payable (money owed to suppliers), taxes due and loans.
• 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 projection

The cash flow forecast of your Georgian restaurant will show how much cash the business is expected to generate or consume over the next three to five years.

There are multiple ways of presenting a cash flow forecast but from experience, it is better to organise it by nature in order to clearly show these elements:

• Operating cash flow: how much cash is generated by the Georgian restaurant's operations
• Investing cash flow: what is the business investing to expand or maintain its equipment 
• Financing cash flow: is the business raising additional funds or repaying financiers (debt repayment, dividends)

Your cash flow forecast is the most important element of your overall financial projection and that’s where you should focus your attention to ensure that your Georgian restaurant is adequately funded.

Note: if you are preparing a financial forecast in order to try to secure funding, you will need to include both a yearly and monthly cash flow forecast in your Georgian restaurant's financial plan. 

Which tool should you use to create your Georgian restaurant's financial forecast?

Creating your Georgian restaurant'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 Georgian restaurant'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 Georgian restaurant 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 Georgian restaurant's financial forecast?

Creating an accurate and error-free Georgian restaurant financial forecast with a spreadsheet is very technical and requires a deep knowledge of accounting and an understanding of financial modelling.

Very few business owners are financially savvy enough to be able to build a forecast themselves on Excel without making mistakes. 

Lenders and investors know this, which is why forecasts created on Excel by the business owner are often frowned upon. 

Having numbers one can trust is key when it comes to financial forecasting and to that end using software is much safer. 

Using financial forecasting software is also faster than using a spreadsheet, and, with the rise of artificial intelligence, software is also becoming smarter at helping us analyse the numbers to make smarter decisions.

Finally, like everything with spreadsheets, tracking actuals vs. forecasts and keeping your projections up to date as the year progresses is manual, tedious, and error-prone. Whereas financial projection software like The Business Plan Shop is built 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 Georgian restaurant, 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 Georgian restaurant

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 Georgian restaurant.

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 Georgian restaurant. 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 create a turnover forecast for a business?
• Financial forecast for a business idea

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