The best business planning software for SMEs and Startups

If you need a business plan and you are trying to figure out which business planning software is best for you, read on.

Business planning can be a difficult task if you have never done it before. It is actually complex and time consuming even for business planning experts. You have to define the business plan structure, decide what analysis needs to be done, do the research, design the pages, build a financial model, check that it is correct, sense check it, and put everything together in a thought-through, engaging, clear, concise but detailed, professional business plan document. The good news is that there are several SaaS business planning tools that will guide you through the business planning process and will allow anyone to create a business plan with ease.

The question is, which software is best for you. The answer is, it depends on your specific use of the business plan. That said, there are several criteria to consider when evaluating business planning software.

Criteria for evaluating business planning software

1. Easy to use . It should guide you through the business planning process so that you can create a business plan even if you have never done one before.
2. Quality of business plan . You should be able to create a high quality business plan. Not just a plan! High quality means a thought through, logical, engaging, concise but complete, easy to read, it answers all the questions a reader could have. Most importantly, it shows that you know your business inside out and you have the capability to succeed.
3. Business plan and pitch deck templates . When creating a business plan, you should never start from scratch. This is just waste of time. Your software should give you ready made templates to start from. It will save you time, it will give you inspiration and it will likely be designed well.
4. Lender ready business plan format . In case you are using the business plan to apply for a SBA or bank loan, make sure it is in a bank approved format.
5. Investor ready pitch deck . If you present your plan to investors, you will likely need a pitch deck, instead of the long, textual business plan. The pitch deck should be graphical and should tell your story in an engaging and confident way. Don’t create a pitch deck with a bunch of bullet point slides!
6. Driver based financial plan . Your financial plan (financial model) helps you think through every aspect of your business. It also shows if you understand your business or not. In your business planning software, you need to be able to build your financial model based on the business drivers that are important for your specific business. If you want to read more about building a professional financial plan, I suggest you read the following article on how to build a professional financial model.
7. Financial model templates . Building a driver based financial model is the most difficult task in the business planning process. If your software provides financial model templates by industry, this is gold. High quality, driver based plan could cost you tens of thousands of dollars if you hire a consultant to do for you.
8. Compare your plan to actual performance . You will need to keep track of your actual performance vs your plan as the time goes by. Get a business planning software that allows you to understand and report your business performance at a click of a button.
9. You can collaborate, share and download your plans .
10. Price . Price is always important, but make sure you look at the value you get for the price.

Comparison of business planning software solutions

The most popular business planning software solutions are Modeliks, Liveplan, Upmetrics, Cuttles and Bizplan.

First the similarities:

1. Ease of use . They all do a pretty good job at guiding the user through the business planning process. In a few days, you will have a basic business plan. For some people this might be enough. BizPlan is the only tool that does not have a business plan builder; they only have a pitch deck creator.
2. Lender approved business plan format . They all have a business plan format in line with bank requirements, if you need your plan to apply for a loan.
3. Collaboration, exporting and sharing the business plan is possible with all.
4. Pricing . They are all priced in a range from USD 15 to 30 per month for a basic plan and USD 40 to 80 per month for Premium plans.

Now, the key differences:

1. Quality of pitch deck .
   Liveplan ask you questions about your business and your answers appear as bullet points in your pitch deck. This approach is super easy to use, however the final pitch deck is not quite investor level quality.
   Modeliks and Upmetrics take a different approach. They provide ready to use, graphical pitch deck templates that you just need to fill out. Modeliks offers minimum of 4 templates per section, so that you have more flexibility in building and customizing your pitch deck.
   BizPlan is somewhere in the middle. They have a graphical pitch builder, but there are no ready made templates within the software.
2. Financial plan quality . Here, Modeliks stands out from the crowd. It is the only software that allows you to create a driver based, professional financial plan. You can create a dynamic, linked financial model where your revenues and costs are all logically linked with each other. The moment you change one assumption in the financial plan, all other linked assumptions will automatically update. The rest of the tools do not have this key functionality. For example, the number waiters you need in a restaurant usually depends on the number customers you have. You can set this logical relationship only in Modeliks.
3. Financial model templates . Also, available only in Modeliks. Staying with the restaurant example, you can use a professionally designed, driver based financial model template for a restaurant business in Modeliks. This feature is worth thousands of dollars. Of course you can adjust the template per your needs, but 90% of the job should already be done for you. Currently Modeliks has financial model templates for SaaS, e-commerce, retail, service businesses and restaurants. More models are coming soon.
4. Compare your plan to actual performance . Liveplan and Modeliks stand out. They are the only tools that have this capability. Liveplan allows for integration with Quickbooks. Modeliks has a stronger reporting functionality because of a wider range of standard financial reports, plus allows you to create custom dashboards for your business. Basically you can customize your reporting to your needs.

Final thoughts

Most business planning software solutions allow you to create a basic business and financial plan, without prior business planning experience. This might be enough if you need a simple plan that will not be looked into detail or challenged by investors or board of directors. If you need a thought-through, investor-ready business plan, Modeliks is the only solution with the full required capability. It is the only tool that allows you to build advanced driver-based financial models, has a graphical pitch deck creator, provides you with financial model templates for several industries and has the most powerful reporting features.