A Management Focused Tool for Developing Pro-Forma Financial Statements

Developing pro-forma financial statements and associated financial analysis is an important undertaking for new and existing business alike. This paper reports user experiences with a spreadsheet-based method for developing pro-forma financial statements as developed in Jalbert (2017). The paper also presents improvements and enhancements to the template. The forecasting approach reported on here requires users to simply enter their firm-specific figures. As such it is particularly useful for individuals without extensive training in finance. The tool does not require programming or the use of plug figures and does not result in circular references which are all common to other tools. The template provides a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and for teaching management, accounting and finance courses. The tool is suitable for both novice and advanced users