The financials are the most important area of any Offering or Plan.  You want your financials to look professional and be easily read.  The spreadsheet file that you download in the templates section covers all of the financials you will need. 

The basics you need for your plan are as follows:  Description of capital expenses, projected profit & loss statement, p&l assumptions, break-even analysis and a balance sheet (if appropriate).  A balance sheet is not appropriate if you are a start-up with no assets or major liabilities.

The area called 'Assumptions' to the side of the Profit and Loss worksheets is very important.  This is where you tell the reader how you have come to the sales and expense projections (validating your educated guesses).  Also, the assumptions section acts as the anchor for most of your formulas in the P&L section.  For this reason, I leave the assumptions in the same worksheet as the P&L; easier to deal with formulas - going back and forth.  

For instance, say you are going to sell pizzas.... You assume that your busy hours are 5pm - 8pm where you will sell 40 pizzas per hour at $10.00 each.  The rest of the 6 open hours, you guess that you will average 15 pizzas per hour.  So you are talking an average day's gross income of (40*3)+(6*15)=210 pizzas or $2,100 per day.  These are some of your assumptions.

Well, that is the type of information you must include in your assumptions section.  Even though 99%of the investors will either not look at it or understand it, you must include it.  

The Break-Even Anaysis can get tricky.  If you look at the Break-Even for Big Land, you can try to follow the formula to see how we arrived at each variable.  The following is a more simple example:

Here is a sample P&L for the pizza parlor mentioned above...

The formula for a B/E is: BES = FC+ VC

Where the BES is Break-Even Sales
                    FC is Fixed Costs
                    VC is Variable Costs

So, if your fixed costs (electricity, rent, advertising, etc.) are projected to total $200,000 for the 1st year.  And,  your variable costs (food, to-go boxes,etc.) are $2.85 per pizza.  Now because we are trying to figure the break-even number, the BES, for now is BESx (where x is the unknown variable).  And, BESx is equal to the average sale times x.  For the pizza parlor, the average pizza sale is $10.00. 

So here is our formula for now:

10x = 200,000 + 2.85x

From that you get:

7.15x = 200,000

And then you do this:

x = 200,000/7.15      or
x = 27,972

This means that to break-even, the pizza place must sell 27,972 pizzas per year, or 72 pizzas per day.

- Remember in high school when you said you'd never need algebra in real life?

 That is all there is to it.  Make sure that you get each spreadsheet to print on a single page (if at all possible).