A good business plan sells your company to the world and can help you get financing, arrange strategic alliances and attract employees. But creating a comprehensive and useful one means including a healthy amount of financial forecasts.

While you could use Excel or Google Docs to create nice spreadsheets, graphs and charts, Profitably is a free cloud-based tool that can quickly display how you plan to grow things like revenue, profits and customers, chart out what tools you’ll use to do it, as well as lay out what your finances will look like in the future.

In addition to its free version which creates a revenue forecast and helps you plan for your ideal customers, Profitably offers a paid version that runs $50 a month or $400 a year and lets you do more detailed analysis as well as integrate QuickBooks data so you can measure your progress meeting goals.

“When it comes to business planning, a lot of companies focus on the pros but don’t nail down the finances,” says Graham Siener, VP of customer development. “We take the work out of the spreadsheet.” He also says the platform is good for existing companies that want to do a better job of justifying business decisions.

To use the planning suite you just answer questions about your revenue streams, customers, employees and vendors. Profitably then does the math for you, and creates charts and graphs that project what your business will likely look like in the future. You can also run scenarios to test what happens if you change the data. For instance, you could see how your customer conversion rate might be affected if you lowered the price of a product, or how your bottom line would fluctuate if you used a new sales channel or hired three new people in six months.

Profitably also has a new scenario comparison feature that can help rationalize new product development by projecting growth scenarios between an existing product versus a future one.

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