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What you need before you start

What to have ready before you build your first forecast in bluprnts — your products, pricing, headcount, costs and funding — and what you can add later.

You need surprisingly little to build your first forecast in bluprnts. Rough numbers are fine — the point is to get a first forecast on the page and refine it, not to have everything precise on day one. There's nothing to connect and no accounting data to import.

What to have to hand#

Have a rough idea of these five things — the same five drivers bluprnts builds a forecast from:

  • What you sell, and for how much — your products or services, their price, and roughly what each one costs you to deliver.
  • How you sell it — the channels you sell through (retail, online, wholesale, direct) and how many you expect to sell a month.
  • Your team — the roles you have or plan to hire, and their salaries.
  • Your costs — rent, software, marketing and other spending that isn't the cost of a product or a person.
  • Your funding — any loans or investment, and how much cash you're starting with.

That's enough to produce a full forecast. You don't need every figure to be exact — sensible estimates get you a first forecast you can then sharpen.

What you can add later#

Everything is editable, so you can start simple and layer detail on:

  • Refine your assumptions — seasonality, growth, price changes and payment terms, once the basics are in.
  • Connect Xero — pull in your real actuals to ground the model and compare plan versus actual. Optional, and always an input rather than the engine.
  • Test decisions — add scenarios and projects to model what-ifs.
  • Share it — turn the forecast into a report for an investor, lender or board.

You don't need accounting data#

Unlike tools that plug into your ledger and project it forward, bluprnts builds the forecast from the operational drivers you already understand. That means you can forecast before you have books — pre-revenue, a new venture, a new product — and you don't need accounting expertise or a connected ledger to start. See Driver-based vs historical modelling.

Ready to start#