Grow Your Business
Know what’s safe to spend, and whether you’re hitting your numbers.
Set a budget you can run the business on, test the decisions you’re weighing against it, and check every month whether it’s holding.
You want to grow your business, but aren’t sure what moves to make...
Can we stay on budget?
Build the budget from your own numbers or straight from QuickBooks or Xero, then see each month where spending ran over and where revenue came in short.
What happens when costs go up?
Run the increase through your forecast and see what it does to profit and cash before it happens rather than after.
Can we expand without a cash crunch?
Test the hire, the equipment purchase, or the next location against your real numbers and see what each one does to your cash position.
A process for making decisions you can defend
Step One: Plan
Set the budget
Start with what you plan to bring in and what you plan to spend, month by month, for the year ahead. That’s the number everything else gets measured against. If you’re already keeping books, you don’t start from scratch: your real revenue and cost categories become the starting point and you adjust from there.
- Revenue by line, not one lump
- Direct costs, payroll, and overhead
- What you’re setting aside and what you owe
- The months you already know will be tight
Why this step is important:
A budget is the only thing that makes “are we doing all right?” a question with an answer.
How LivePlan helps
Build it from scratch, talk it through with Help Me Forecast, import a spreadsheet, or start from your QuickBooks or Xero data. See how budgeting works
Step Two: Forecast
Test the decisions you’re weighing
Every decision worth making costs money before it makes any. The hire, the equipment purchase, the second location, the price change, the slow season you know is coming. Build a version of your budget with each one in it and see what it does to profit and to cash, months before you have to commit.
- Can we afford to hire, now or part-time?
- Can we buy the equipment this year, or does it wait?
- What does a second location do to cash?
- What happens to margin if we raise prices?
Why this step is important:
You find out what a decision costs while you can still make a different one.
How LivePlan helps
Build up to 10 versions of your budget and compare them side by side. See how scenarios work
Step Three: Review
See whether you hit your numbers
Each month, line your actuals up against your budget and look at the gaps. Where did revenue land short? Where did spending run over? What did that do to cash? The gaps are the useful part: each one is either something to fix or something you were wrong about, and both are worth knowing in March rather than in December.
- Which products or services performed better or worse than you expected
- Which expenses ran over budget
- Whether you collected the money you booked
- What your cash looks like for the next few months
Why this step is important:
Businesses that continually track against their plan grow 30% faster than those that don’t, according to a study in the Journal of Management Studies.
How LivePlan helps
Connect QuickBooks or Xero and your actuals arrive on their own. The Monthly financial review explains what changed, what’s working, and what to fix next. See budget vs. actual
Step Four: Refine
Adjust, then go again next month
Use what the month told you. Change a price, cut a cost, move spending to what’s working, push a purchase out a quarter. Then update the budget so it reflects the business you’re actually running, and do the whole thing again next month. That loop is the entire method, and it’s what separates a budget from a document.
- Raise or lower prices on specific products
- Cut costs that aren’t earning their place
- Move spending toward what’s working
How LivePlan helps
Update the budget and every connected number moves with it, so next month’s comparison is against the plan you’re actually running. Keep an eye on cash