How to create a financial forecast for a home interior wholesaler?

If you are serious about keeping visibility on your future cash flows, then you need to build and maintain a financial forecast for your home interior wholesaler.
Putting together a home interior wholesaler financial forecast may sound complex, but don’t worry, with the right tool, it’s easier than it looks, and The Business Plan Shop is here to guide you.
In this practical guide, we'll cover everything you need to know about building financial projections for your home interior wholesaler.
We will start by looking at why they are key, what information is needed, what a forecast looks like once completed, and what solutions you can use to create yours.
Let's dive in!
Why create and maintain a financial forecast for a home interior wholesaler?
Creating and maintaining an up-to-date financial forecast is the only way to steer the development of your home interior wholesaler and ensure that it can be financially viable in the years to come.
A financial plan for a home interior wholesaler 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 home interior wholesaler 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 home interior wholesaler'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.
Need a convincing business plan?
The Business Plan Shop makes it easy to create a financial forecast to assess the potential profitability of your projects, and write a business plan that’ll wow investors.

What information is used as input to build a home interior wholesaler financial forecast?
A home interior wholesaler'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 home interior wholesaler.
If you are creating (or updating) the forecast of an existing home interior wholesaler, 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 home interior wholesaler 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 home interior wholesaler 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 home interior wholesaler's financial forecast.
The sales forecast for a home interior wholesaler
From experience, it usually makes sense to start your home interior wholesaler's financial projection with the revenues forecast.
The inputs used to forecast your sales will include the historical trading data of your home interior wholesaler (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 home interior wholesaler'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:
- Increased demand for sustainable and eco-friendly home interior products may drive up your average price as these products tend to be more expensive.
- A decrease in disposable income of your target customers may lead to a decrease in the number of monthly transactions as they may opt for more budget-friendly options.
- The introduction of new and trendy home interior designs may attract more customers, resulting in an increase in the number of monthly transactions.
- Inflation and rising production costs may force you to increase your average price in order to maintain your profit margin.
- A shift in consumer preferences towards minimalistic and simplistic home interior designs may lead to a decrease in your average price as these designs tend to be less expensive.
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.
Need a convincing business plan?
The Business Plan Shop makes it easy to create a financial forecast to assess the potential profitability of your projects, and write a business plan that’ll wow investors.

The operating expenses for a home interior wholesaler
The next step is to estimate the costs you’ll have to incur to operate your home interior wholesaler.
These will vary based on where your business is located, and its overall size (level of sales, personnel, etc.).
But your home interior wholesaler's operating expenses should normally include the following items:
- Staff Costs: This includes salaries, benefits, and payroll taxes for your employees. As a home interior wholesaler, you will need to hire sales representatives, warehouse staff, and administrative personnel.
- Accountancy Fees: You will need to hire an accountant to keep track of your financial records, prepare tax returns, and provide financial advice.
- Insurance Costs: As a wholesaler, you will need to have insurance for your inventory, property, and liability. This will protect your business in case of any unforeseen events.
- Software Licences: You will need to invest in software to help you manage your inventory, track sales, and handle accounting. This may include inventory management software, accounting software, and customer relationship management (CRM) software.
- Banking Fees: You will need to pay fees for bank accounts, credit card processing, and other financial services. Make sure to research different banks to find the best rates and services for your business.
- Rent or Mortgage: If you are operating from a physical location, you will need to pay rent or a mortgage for your office or warehouse space.
- Utilities: This includes electricity, water, and gas for your business premises. You may also need to pay for internet and phone services.
- Marketing and Advertising: You will need to allocate a budget for promoting your business and products. This may include social media advertising, print ads, and attending trade shows.
- Shipping and Freight Costs: As a wholesaler, you will need to ship your products to buyers. This will include the cost of packaging materials, shipping fees, and any customs or import/export fees.
- Office Supplies: You will need to purchase office supplies such as paper, ink, pens, and other supplies to keep your business running smoothly.
- Travel Expenses: If you need to attend trade shows or meet with suppliers or clients, you will need to budget for travel expenses such as airfare, hotel accommodations, and meals.
- Professional Memberships and Subscriptions: You may need to join professional organizations or subscribe to industry publications to stay updated on trends and network with other wholesalers.
- Repairs and Maintenance: You will need to budget for any repairs or maintenance of your office or warehouse space, as well as any equipment used in your business.
- Legal Fees: It's important to have a lawyer on retainer to handle any legal issues that may arise, such as contract disputes or intellectual property protection.
- Taxes: As a business owner, you will need to pay taxes on your profits. Make sure to budget for income taxes, sales tax, and any other applicable taxes.
This list is not exhaustive by any means, and will need to be tailored to your home interior wholesaler's specific circumstances.
What investments are needed to start or grow a home interior wholesaler?
Once you have an idea of how much sales you could achieve and what it will cost to run your home interior wholesaler, it is time to look into the equipment required to launch or expand the activity.
For a home interior wholesaler, capital expenditures and initial working capital items could include:
- Inventory: This includes the cost of purchasing and storing products in your warehouse or showroom. As a home interior wholesaler, you will need to invest in a wide range of furniture, decor, and other home goods to offer to your customers.
- Warehouse/Showroom Space: You will need to rent or purchase a space to store your inventory and display your products. This can include expenses such as rent, utilities, and maintenance costs.
- Transportation Equipment: As a wholesaler, you will need to transport your products from your warehouse to your customers. This may require purchasing vehicles, such as trucks or vans, and other transportation equipment.
- Technology and Software: In order to effectively manage your inventory, sales, and finances, you will likely need to invest in technology and software. This can include purchasing computers, POS systems, and inventory management software.
- Furniture and Fixtures: As a home interior wholesaler, you will need to create a welcoming and attractive showroom to display your products. This may require purchasing furniture, lighting, and other fixtures to enhance the overall shopping experience for your customers.
Again, this list will need to be adjusted according to the specificities of your home interior wholesaler.
Need a convincing business plan?
The Business Plan Shop makes it easy to create a financial forecast to assess the potential profitability of your projects, and write a business plan that’ll wow investors.

The financing plan of your home interior wholesaler
The next step in the creation of your financial forecast for your home interior 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 home interior wholesaler?
Now let's have a look at the main output tables of your home interior wholesaler's financial forecast.
The profit & loss forecast
The forecasted profit & loss statement will enable you to visualise your home interior wholesaler's expected growth and profitability over the next three to five years.

A financially viable P&L statement for a home interior wholesaler 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
Your home interior wholesaler'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 forecast
Your home interior 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 home interior 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 home interior 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 home interior wholesaler's financial plan - so that banks or investors can assess seasonal variation and ensure your business is appropriately capitalised.
Need a convincing business plan?
The Business Plan Shop makes it easy to create a financial forecast to assess the potential profitability of your projects, and write a business plan that’ll wow investors.

Which tool should you use to create your home interior wholesaler's financial forecast?
Creating your home interior 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 forecasting software to build your home interior wholesaler'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 home interior 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 home interior wholesaler's financial forecast?
Creating an accurate and error-free home interior wholesaler 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.
Need a convincing business plan?
The Business Plan Shop makes it easy to create a financial forecast to assess the potential profitability of your projects, and write a business plan that’ll wow investors.

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 home interior wholesaler, 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 home interior wholesaler

Takeaways
- A financial projection shows expected growth, profitability, and cash generation for your business over the next three to five years.
- Tracking actuals vs. forecast and keeping your financial forecast up-to-date is the only way to maintain visibility on future cash flows.
- Using financial forecasting software makes it easy to create and maintain up-to-date projections for your home interior wholesaler.
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 home interior wholesaler. Don't hesitate to contact our team if you have any questions or want to share your experience building forecasts!
Need a convincing business plan?
The Business Plan Shop makes it easy to create a financial forecast to assess the potential profitability of your projects, and write a business plan that’ll wow investors.

Also on The Business Plan Shop
- Example of financial projections
- How to create a sales forecast for a business?
- Financial forecast template for a business idea
Know someone who runs or wants to start a home interior wholesaler? Share our financial projection guide with them!