Product Reviews

The Business Software Centre's Ultimate Business Planner is designed to help you create a professional plan from scratch. The software has been designed with non-technical users in mind. Creating a plan is a step-by-step process, which has been broken into two sections: writing your plan and creating a financial forecast.

While Ultimate Business Planner is aimed at start-up businesses, you could also use it to produce financial forecasts or acquire a loan to expand an existing business. The software builds a three-year plan, but you can go back and change the details to create 'what if' scenarios.

The idea is that even those with no business expertise can follow each step to build a well-structured plan. Along the way the software provides expert hints and tips to help you through the process. Ultimate Business Planner has been written for users in the UK, so all the taxation information relates to UK tax payers. The software even tells you when your accounts are due and provides the tax rates depending on your projected income.

When you first start the program it takes you through

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a six-step planning process. Here you enter all the relevant information about your business, from basic details such as the name and address to information on income, expenses, assets, liabilities and equity. Once you have entered all this data the final step is to write up your plan.

As you tackle each new page of information, you can read advice on exactly what data is required, plus tips on how to maximise the competitiveness of your business. We found these tips really useful and perfectly comprehensible to the less business minded, which is unusual in software of this type. That said, you'll need a solid understanding of your business's finances to get the most out of this software, so complete beginners may still find parts of the program baffling.

If you're using the software to forecast for an existing business that uses Intuit's QuickBooks, you can import data directly from it, which speeds things up a bit.

The software also includes 1,000 sample plans, so if you're not confident enough to create your own, you can use one of these off-the-peg plans. Unless you run an identical business, however, these offer little more than inspiration, as you will have to substitute your own information to build your plan.

Once you have written a plan, you can use a range of graphs and charts to look at financial information and make projections about profit and loss, expenses, income and so on. These provide a clear picture of how your business stands, and you can adjust them by changing the information in your plan.

Ultimate Business Planner is a good tool for the budding entrepreneur, although its slightly boring interface lets it down a little.