The base for building a custom financial model for any business.

The Starter Financial Model is a three year spreadsheet financial model template for Excel or Google Sheets with a flexible, driver-based system for forecasting expenses aggregating into a consolidated three statement model, outputting income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows with key charts, summaries, key metrics, and funding forecasts. No prebuilt revenue model, easy to build in your own custom revenue forecasts. No locked cells, no macros, edit anything. One-time purchase, lifetime access. Select the Model only or add on the Custom Revenue Model option for 2 hours of personal support in building a custom revenue model for your business.

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“The starter model made it super easy for me to create a 3 year plan for our new business. Worth the investment. Taylor has also been super helpful and jumped on a call to explain how things worked. He went above and beyond what I expected.”

Ty Zamkow, Co-Founder & CEO, Nolana

Walkthrough

Highlights

The Starter Model is built to be the simplest, "Minimum Viable Model" for an entrepreneur to use to raise capital. The focus is still on expenses, cash, and runway, but also includes consolidated financial statements - income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows - along with more detailed approach to the operating costs, equity and debt financing, inventory (if applicable), and accounting treatment of the expense forecast. The model is easy to use to build in your own revenue and growth forecast, but that structure does not come prebuilt.

Structure

The default timescale is a monthly model with annual summaries, built for 36 months, or 3 years. Easy to amend the total time period - shorter or longer.

Change the base timescale from months to quarters or years by selecting a dropdown. Years can be absolute (e.g. 2022) or relative (e.g. Year 1) to make it easy to create forecasts of speculative businesses and starting points.

Easy to add in actual financials to create forward-looking rolling forecasts and historical budget v. actual variances.

Easy to build a custom revenue model

The Starter Model provides no prebuilt structure for forecasting revenues but is completely open, so you may build in any logic to forecast your revenues and expenses - growth rates, customers, users, employees, etc. - in any way you want. More details on integrating a custom revenue model are at How to integrate any model into a Foresight base model.

For a seed-stage entrepeneur, the focus is on costs, and I'd argue that a detailed revenue forecast is not necessary, thus the structural choice I made with the model to focus on costs and not revenues.

If you need a prebuilt revenue model, check out the Standard Financial Model, which shares the same common financial core but adds a prebuilt structure to forecast revenues using a range of assumptions around paid and organic growth, sales efforts, conversion rates, churn, repeat purchase rates, prices, cost of goods sold, and much more.

Easy to create cost forecasts

The model offers an extensive structure for forecasting costs, allowing you to input specific costs, one-off and repeating costs using growth rates, and driver-based forecasts, calculating expenses from financial and operational metrics. Each expense line can be selected, through dropdowns, into preset (but editable) SG&A and Cost of Sales categories for reporting purposes.

Create hiring plans by inputting specific roles and hires, or let hires be determined by other metrics (e.g. employees in a certain function, users, customers, many more options).

Input all your expenses, and select the accounting treatment, and the model will handle how the expense is handled in the financial statements, as well as any resulting effects like depreciation, repayment schedules, and more.

Robust financial and managerial reporting

The model creates consolidated financial statements - income statement (profit and loss, or P&L), balance sheet, and statement of cash flows - on a monthly basis, summarized into annual reports. Applicable worldwide, independent of GAAP or IFRS accounting methods. Equity, debt, and grant funding can be input, and creates sources and uses reports and burn and runway charts automatically.

Model handles corporate taxes and value-added taxes (VAT) automatically, with options for different accrual and payment schedules. Depreciation, accounts receivable, deferred revenues, and other balance sheet calculations have prebuilt logic, change if necessary.

Track actual financials by pulling in Quickbooks, Xero or other (manual data pull or requires third-party integrations) to create rolling forecasts and budget v. actual variances over different time periods.

Assign expenses and revenues to separate business lines and automatically create a P&L that details revenues, expenses and margin profile per segment.

One-time purchase and free access to updates

Model is one .xlsx Excel file or Google Sheets Workbook and is downloaded or accessed immediately. No macros or VBA used. Can be used in Excel, Google Docs, and many other spreadsheet programs. Email or book a call for support anytime. One time purchase, updates automatically distributed for free.

Download immediately and anytime.

You will have the option to download a Microsoft Excel .xlsx file and copy a Google Sheet file immediately after purchase or submission or your email, and anytime through the link in your email receipt, as well as by logging into my transaction provider at Gumroad and creating an account.

Live outside the USA? Purchasing power parity discounts are automatically applied in your cart if applicable.

Use in any recommended spreadsheet program.

Foresight's spreadsheet models can be used in both Excel and Google Sheets interchangeably; simply upload the Microsoft Excel model template from Foresight into Google Sheets, or download the Google Sheets to Excel, and everything will structurally work fine.

The models are originally built in Google Sheets, and the formatting is a bit better in Google Sheets; in Excel you may want to adjust the row spacing, fonts, and chart formatting to get the aesthetics you want.

Your payment is secure.

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You'll get a payment receipt by email immediately after purchase. Note, you will see Gumroad, not Foresight, on your payment card or PayPal statement.

Legal

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