How to create a financial forecast for a pharmaceutical manufacturer?

If you are serious about keeping visibility on your future cash flows, then you need to build and maintain a financial forecast for your pharmaceutical manufacturing business.

Putting together a pharmaceutical manufacturing business 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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business. 

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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business?

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

A financial plan for a pharmaceutical manufacturing business 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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business 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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business'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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business financial forecast?

A pharmaceutical manufacturing business'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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business.

If you are creating (or updating) the forecast of an existing pharmaceutical manufacturing business, 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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business 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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business 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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business's financial forecast.

The sales forecast for a pharmaceutical manufacturing business

From experience, it usually makes sense to start your pharmaceutical manufacturing business's financial projection with the revenues forecast.

The inputs used to forecast your sales will include the historical trading data of your pharmaceutical manufacturing business (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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business'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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business

The next step is to estimate the expenses needed to run your pharmaceutical manufacturing business on a day-to-day basis.

These will vary based on the level of sales expected, and the location and size of your business. 

But your pharmaceutical manufacturing business's operating expenses should include the following items at a minimum:

This list is, of course, not exhaustive, and you'll have to adapt it according to your precise business model and size. A small pharmaceutical manufacturing business might not have the same level of expenditure as a larger one, for example.

What investments are needed to start or grow a pharmaceutical manufacturing business?

Creating and expanding a pharmaceutical manufacturing business also requires investments which you need to factor into your financial forecast.

Capital expenditures and initial working capital items for a pharmaceutical manufacturing business could include elements such as:

Again, this list is not exhaustive and will need to be adjusted according to the circumstances of your pharmaceutical manufacturing business.

The financing plan of your pharmaceutical manufacturing business

The next step in the creation of your financial forecast for your pharmaceutical manufacturing business 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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business?

Now let's have a look at the main output tables of your pharmaceutical manufacturing business's financial forecast.

The profit & loss forecast

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

A financially viable P&L statement for a pharmaceutical manufacturing business 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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business'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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business 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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business'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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business 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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business's financial plan. 

Which tool should you use to create your pharmaceutical manufacturing business's financial projections?

Building a pharmaceutical manufacturing business 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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business'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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business 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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business's financial forecast?

Creating an accurate and error-free pharmaceutical manufacturing business financial forecast on Excel (or any spreadsheet) is very technical and requires both a strong grasp of accounting principles and solid skills in financial modelling.

Most entrepreneurs lack the expertise required to create an accurate financial forecast using spreadsheet software like Excel or Google Sheets. As a result, it is unlikely anyone will trust your numbers.

The second reason is that it is inefficient. Building forecasts on spreadsheets was the only option in the 1990s and early 2000s, nowadays technology has advanced and software can do it much faster and much more accurately. 

This is why professional forecasters all use software. With the rise of AI, software is also becoming smarter at helping us detect mistakes in our forecasts and helping us analyse the numbers to make better decisions.

Finally, like everything with spreadsheets, tracking actuals vs. forecasts and updating your forecast as the year progresses is manual, tedious, error-prone, and time-consuming. Whereas financial forecasting 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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business, 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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business

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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business 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 pharmaceutical manufacturing business, 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 sales forecast for a business?
• Sample financial forecast for business idea

Know someone who owns or is thinking of starting a pharmaceutical manufacturing business? Share our forecasting guide with them!