LivePlan

Live Plan was perfect for my needs - it helped me shape my strategic plan and think through my start-up capital requirements and revenue projections. I loved that it gave me some industry benchmarks and suggested budget items (like employee payroll liabilities) I hadn't thought of. The templates were also very helpful to show me what a plan should look like.

I didn't like that the software didn't highlight at the beginning how to coordinate between my LivePlan line items and my Quick Bookls like items. It made using the review feature (to compare projections with performance) more difficult to use.

Cloud based, easy step by step process for planning for novices. Once you have put in the basics of revenue streams and costs its very easy to play "what if" type questions and see the impact on your forecast.
You can get into enormous detail if you want or build this up over time as you develop your thought process.

Where the product really falls down is when you want to compare with Actuals. It only connects to Xero and Quick Books and you have no control over the data or time period that it syncs at all - current year plus last two years, which is rubbish if your business has pivoted and you only want the last six months data for example.
Whats worse is you cant roll back the sync - you have to manually delete all sync'd data.
Further if you dont use Xero or QBooks, there is no option to import from a spreadsheet - so again you need a data entry person to manually enter actual data unless you want to spend ages doing it yourself...
Very disappointed as up to this point had liked the platform.

This product may be good for existing business - it could be utilized for other businesses we operate that have an existing track record. However, it is not software to be used for a startup business.

For a startup business looking into sales forecasting, it is highly unusual to post monthly revenues and costs - it is 'overly precise' and a recipe for failure. Quarterly and semi-annual forecasting is absent from the software package. I do not know of businesses which file taxes each month nor annually, but those are the options provided by LivePlan.