How to create a financial forecast for a personal services company?

Creating a financial forecast for your personal services company, 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 personal services company 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 personal services company?

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

A financial plan for a personal services 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 personal services 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 personal services 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 needed to build a personal services company 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 personal services company, 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 personal services company 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 personal services company, 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 personal services company's financial forecast.

The sales forecast for a personal services company

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

The inputs used to forecast your sales will include the historical trading data of your personal services 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 personal services 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 personal services company

The next step is to estimate the costs you’ll have to incur to operate your personal services company.

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

But your personal services company'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 personal services company's specific circumstances.

What investments are needed to start or grow a personal services company?

Your personal services company financial forecast will also need to include the capital expenditures (aka investments in plain English) and initial working capital items required for the creation or development of your business.

For a personal services company, these could include:

Again, this list will need to be adjusted according to the size and ambitions of your personal services company.

The financing plan of your personal services company

The next step in the creation of your financial forecast for your personal services 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 personal services company?

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

The profit & loss forecast

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

A financially viable P&L statement for a personal services 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

Your personal services company'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 personal services company 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 personal services company'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 personal services company 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 personal services company's financial plan. 

Which tool should you use to create your personal services company's financial projections?

Building a personal services company financial forecast is not difficult provided that you use the right tool for the job. Let’s see what options are available below.

Using online financial forecasting software to build your personal services 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 personal services 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 personal services company's financial forecast?

Creating an accurate and error-free personal services company 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 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. 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 personal services 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 personal services 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 create a turnover forecast for a business?
• Financial forecast for a business idea

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