Business PlanPro 2003

Business Plan Pro includes thousands of industry profiles to help you run your business's financial numbers. You can also include your own graphics, and automatically develop full-color, 3-D charts. Import data from QuickBooks, and Microsoft Word and Excel. Business Plan Pro 2003 offers everything you need to define your business, compare industry ratios, set schedules, create personnel and mini marketing plans, and find funding.

A Business Plan Pro business plan is composed of text, tables and charts. The system has a book that gives you some guidance on what to discuss for each text section but it's not really much. The two books that my box included were: Hurdle - The Book on Business Planning, and the manual. Hurdle was just OK. Moreover, the software is a divided screen with panes that guide you with text describing what you should write and where you are, but they leave a lot to be desired. The sample business plan for my company, a small computer consulting firm, was a joke.

But if you don't know what a Balance Sheet or a Cash Flow are, you're just plain screwed. I had a SCORE counselor review 2 business plans that I wrote with this product and he just hated them. The numbers were all wrong and non-sensical and I didn't even know what the reports meant. Moreover the reports, which are automatically generated, include tons of stuff that is very high level and generic. For example, one line item is "Sales Tax, VAT, HST/GST Received," which appears to be relevant in Canada and Europe and thus shouldn't be included here. Moreover, does that make sense in a business that is a service and doesn't have any employees? Also, there were many items that were there but had "0" values, such as "New Current Borrowing." The maker, Palo Alto Software, is selling a one-size fits all package. Beware!

I'm a programmer, not a businessman. And if you're not a businessman, this is the problem you'll have with this product. That's why I say its a tool, not a magic bullet. As my SCORE counselor said, "It won't magically produce a business plan for you."


Cautious   March 29, 2003
12 out of 32 found this review helpful

I have use an older version of this softaware and found it to be awkward as will many business plan software. Most bus plan software in general tries to make a basic task, that can be time consuming, but relatively straight forward, simplier. Actually a good MS Excel and MsWord templete would do the same thing. I have reviewed several types of BP software, I don't think any of them would making my job much easier.


Unable to import from Excel   March 28, 2003
9 out of 16 found this review helpful

I was unable to import from Excel to the locations I need to, otherwise the program was good.


The worst customer support I've ever encountered   March 26, 2003
K. Hentges (California)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful

The software promises free links to various resources. When I tried the links I was asked to pay. I contacted online support, but they came back with an answer unrelated to my question which they oviously didn't read. Other attempts to contact customer support were ignored. I gave the software 3 stars because I did get a good looking plan out of it.