Product Description

Business Plan Pro 2007 is the easiest way to create a practical, successful business plan. If you need to finish your plan and accomplish your goal in the most Professional and most efficient way possible. Develop a successful, profitable business plan; put your ideas on Paper and turn them into a viable plan that investors & banks will be attracted to. You can produce a professional plan that will be respected by business colleagues, in just a few clicks Advanced collaboration tools -- assign portions of the plan to team members and then combine it all into a complete plan New Wizard-driven Financials that can be exported to Microsoft Word and Excel, PowerPoint, or to Adobe PDF documents Publish to a secure Website and create logins for trusted readers to view your plan

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1970 in Software
• Brand: Palo Alto Software, Inc.
• Model: BPPX
• Released on: 2006-07-19
• Platforms: Windows 2000, Windows Vista, Windows XP
• Format: CD-ROM

Features

• Produce a beautiful business plan with better control over layout and design
• Create custom business plans with this complete business-planning tool
• 500+ real business plans for getting started; easily accessible help resources
• More convenient menus, improved icons, and updated toolbars
• Full-screen mode maximizes workspace for viewing as much info as possible

Amazon.com
With Palo Alto Business Plan 2007, you get the newest, most complete business planning tool available all in one package. Business Plan Pro is more than just software that creates a business plan. Business Plan Pro is a complete business planning package that will help you improve and grow your business for years to come.

View the Business Plan Pro 2007 demo.

Create forecasts visually with a "drag and drop" graphic forecaster. The Graphic Forecaster is a simple and powerful tool to streamline the forecasting process. View larger.

Create a PowerPoint presentation quickly and easily. Export charts, financials, and text directly to PowerPoint. View larger.

You can't get stuck with the automatic row-by-row help system. It provides advice, information, and answers for every step of every spreadsheet. View larger.

Search for venture capital firms by location, type of funding, company stage, and funding requirements. View larger.

The Business Plan from Start to Finish
Business Plan Pro is based on a business plan format recognized by leading banks, lenders, investors, and the Small Business Administration (SBA). Business Plan Pro walks you through the entire planning process and generates a complete, professional and ready-to-distribute plan with a proven formula for success. With the program's proprietary EasyPlan Wizard, writing a business plan is easier than ever, making it a snap to get started.

But creating a business plan is not just for startups. You can take your business to the next level with easy-to-use, powerful, "Plan vs. Actual" financial tools. You can also track your results and manage your business better by comparing your actual numbers to the figures you projected in your plan. These tools help you better manage your profits, expenses and cash flow.

Business Plan Pro 2007 features an EasyPlan Wizard asks you simple questions, then determines the next steps based on your unique answers. Not only does Business Plan Pro walk you through the entire planning process with instructions throughout, but you also have access to detailed examples from over 500 sample business plans from hundreds of different industries. Whether you are planning a new business or simply revising your business strategy, the step-by-step guides and resources will make the planning process simple and easy.

Every page you create is automatically organized and collated to produce a bulletproof business plan, in the preferred format of banks, investors and the SBA that gets results. You can customize your plan by easily importing your own graphics, logos, photos, and even fonts and layouts. Once you're done, it's easy to distribute your plan by exporting to Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint, or Adobe PDF. You can even upload your completed business plan to a secure password-protected web site.

500 Sample Business Plans and 9,000 Industry Profiles
You never have to worry about writer's block with Business Plan Pro. With an extensive library of over 500 sample plans, you can select the plan that mirrors your general business concept, and use it as a guide to help you write your own. These plans can be viewed from our Sample Plan Browser as an example while you write your plan, or can be edited directly using Business Plan Pro. You can also sort the plans by industry type, view a summary paragraph of the plan, and skim the plan in a printable format.

In addition, the program includes market research on virtually every industry so you can match your numbers to industry averages for an accurate business plan. This comprehensive collection of data is based on your Standard Industrial Classification code (SIC code) and the information is integrated automatically into your plan. Need to know what others in your industry are spending? What you should spend on marketing? What is your initial cost per unit? It's all just a click away.

Forecast Growth and Get Funding
Once the start-up wizard helps you create a foundation for your cash-flow projections, Business Plan Pro can then guide you through completing an accurate cash flow and balance sheet. This lets you make realistic projections and helps you understand when you will break even and when you will start making money.

Everybody knows you can't get money without a plan. Business Plan Pro has everything you need to create a custom business plan so you can get the money needed to execute on your idea. Business Plan Pro includes a valuable venture capital database, friends and family financing guide, and many SBA resources.

With a completely redesigned home page, and an embedded business glossary that provides detailed definitions of business terms in just one-click, Business Plan Pro couldn't be easier to use. Business Plan Pro even checks for more common errors than ever and suggests solutions. Included as bonus materials with the software are two popular books -- The Art of the Start, by best-selling author Guy Kawasaki, and Hurdle: The Book on Business Planning, by planning expert Tim Berry.

Customer Reviews

almost brilliant
This is a fantastic product that really walks you through setting up a business plan step-by-step. It calculates things in the background and basically prepares a professional-looking document for you. You'll be surprised what you are able to throw together in just a few days, and it really gives you a sense of accomplishment, which may be lacking in the early days of a startup. The customer service is pretty good. They usually get back to you the same day if you send them an e-mail, though they can be a bit short with you if your question is too obvious to them. They're not long on explanation, though, so if you're looking for a more thorough understanding of the product you won't get it there.

The major objection I have to this product, though, is the formatting of the actual plan. Though it's licensed by Microsoft Word, it really doesn't have any of Word's tools, and so there are all kinds of spacing and margin problems that arise for which there is no cure. If you're a regular Word user, you'll expect to be able to do certain things to the text you're working on and believe me, you can't! I'd say about 40% of Word's features are included in BPP. If you export it to Word, you can use Word's tools there, but it doesn't export that well, you can't re-import, and it's basically just a very clunky proccess. So this product is great for setting up your report, but lousy for finishing it. Plan on having to re-format a lot of your plan before actually presenting it to anyone if you care at all about aesthetics and complicated things like page breaks.

What good is a business plan if it looks like garbage?
This is the second or third business plan builder I have used, and it may be the best I've seen for putting together a plan in a logical, cohesive process. But it is by far the WORST piece of software I have ever used for formatting output and ending up with a polished, professional-looking finished product. This application is diseased with problems in spacing, indentation, tabs, bullets, numbering, and anything else that may be imported from Word or applied within this program. The MS Word export function flat-out CRASHED my MSWord XP Professional, and anything imported from Word ended up with a mind of its own once it hit Business Plan Pro. So here I am with a nice, tidy little business plan -- but I have to completely re-do it in Word and Excel or look like an idiot when I hand it out in presentations.

As much as I appreciate this product's ability to walk one through a business plan, what good is the plan if it is irreversibly locked into an ugly, inconsistent, un-fixable format for printing?

On the technical side it is weak... on the business side it is hard to ask for more...
Over all this software is very good.

The software does crash. But not as often as other reviews make it appear. Also, I had to download the latest update manually because it couldn't auto-magically figure out my internet connection is persistent.

My experience with this can be summed up easily. It is easy to use, when you have a question or you are at a loss, the answer is already on the screen or one click away.

This software was obviously designed with end users in mind. It has a simple layout and it just couldn't be easier to use in my opinion.

The reports look professional and clean. I find it hard to believe others were complaining about the final reports. If the reports generated aren't clean and/or professional enough, I would have to say someone is living in a fantasy world. No banker, angel, or VC wants to see animated gifs or pinstripes on a business plan. Please get a grip on reality before you attempt to start a business!

All the numbers are integrated and calculated so they are consistent across the entire business plan. If you had to do that manually you would be screwed every time you made a revision to a single entry. You would have to find where that entry was calculated across your entire plan and make the changes everywhere... This feature ALONE is worth the price of admission!

The software comes with two books also. No, not user manuals. Books that help you understand more about starting a business and how to plan appropriately.

I can see why this is highly recommended. I will recommend it to anyone who is serious about starting a business and wants to validate their assumptions or get funding.