Why is organizing your plan so important?
Organizing your plan means ordering all your financial activities into sections and groups. It's like organizing your computer files into folders and sub-folders.
It allows you to categorize your plan by region, product type, brand, entity, or any other category you can think of.
Unlike a traditional folder system, there are other benefits you gain from doing this:
- View totals of groups and sections in your reports
- Move large parts of your plan at once on the timeline
- Automatically calculate inventory requirements or cost of sales for entire groups at once
- Focus on numbers for specific groups or sections on your dashboard
- Test an idea by turning on/off sections or groups.
What are groups and sections?
A group encompasses the financial activities of the business. Use them to group similar products or related costs. For example, you could create a group called "Shoe Sales" that includes all the different shoe types you sell.
A section includes multiple groups. You could have a section called "Sales" that contains the groups "Shoe Sales" and "Clothing Sales".
By organizing your plan this way, when you go to your reports, you can click the arrows next to the top lines to reveal the structure. In this example, you will be able to drill down into "Cash received" on your cash flow to reveal the total of sales. Drill into sales and you'll see the totals for "Shoe Sales" and "Clothing Sales". Drill further into these groups and you'll see the numbers for each individual product.
Adding Components to Groups
What is a Component?
Components contain your financial information and are added to your groups. Press the 'Add Components' button inside any group to start adding to it. They are split into four types: Income (green), Costs (red), Assets (yellow) and Funding (Blue). Components can be named to reflect something in your business.
See the full components guide here.
Examples:
- An Income Component could be named T-Shirts to represent something you are selling.
- An Operational Cost Component could be named Phone bills to represent a business overhead.
- An Asset Component could be named Delivery Van to represent a vehicle the business owns.
- A Loan Component could be named Startup loan to represent the funding used to start the business.
It's really up to you. Name them how you see fit.
Once added to your plan, you can click on any component, which will open a new panel on the right-hand side that allows you to enter your numbers for that specific component. We'll go into more detail on this in another guide.