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More Update Post: 03_07_2009
Preparing the financial
statement for Financial Analysis that enables the assessment of the viability of the
venture based on the adopted Growth Strategic Plan is usually both
challenging and tedious.
In general, preparing the
Financial Statement is just the start of venture viability analysis;
Financial Analysis has to be performed on the Financial Statement to
ascertain the viability of the venture; hence the financial
statements are subsequently subjected to financial analysis to
generate two essential Financial ratios: The Operating Statistics or
ratios shown in Table 1, and the Key Financial Ratios shown in Table
2.
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Table 1. Pro Forma
Operating Statistics[/ Ratios] |
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Revenue
Cost of Revenue
Gross Margin
Research & Development
Marketing
Sales
Administration
General Expenses
Operating Expenses
Operating Income
Pretax Deductions
Pre-Tax Profit (Loss)
Taxes on Income
Net Profit (Loss) |
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The Operating Statistics is
based on the Income Statement, while the Key Financial Ratios is
based on the Balance Sheet. The results of these financial ratios
reveal the position of the venture entity relative to the norm
within the industry in which the venture-entity conducts business.
The astute entrepreneur must develop and use these ratios as would
any financing entity. The entrepreneur should use these ratios to
adjust the operations or to reposition the venture-entity into
conformance with the industry norm.
Evidently, these
considerations are important indeed because the Cumulative Profit
(Loss) depends on them, but even more significantly it also provides
the information about the time-to-turn black, a very critical
information in the financial analysis of the venture. Indeed, the
assessment of the viability of the venture entails the
determination, first and foremost, that the time-to-turn black
exists, and then does so within the acceptable empirically
determined time-span.
Realistically, the breadth
of this task of development of the records for preparing the
Financial Statement demands on the entrepreneur to mentally operate
the tasks and activities of every business function of the venture,
on a daily basis beginning from the first day of Start-up of
Operations through the first week to generate the financial records
of the week, and then repeatedly perform the sequential execution
of these operations through the venture development time-span, and
while so doing generating the daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and
yearly financial records needed to produce the Pro Forma Financial
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Statements; and until an efficacious Financial statements, for
assessing the efficacy of the Growth Tactics Plan ascertaining the viability of the venture,
is developed.
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Table 2. Pro Forma
Key Financial Statistics |
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Current Ratio
Debt-to-Equity
Return on equity
Working Capital
Net Worth |
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In the event that such efficacy
can not be ascribed to the Growth Tactics Plan at the conclusion of
each such Thought Experiment administration and management of the
venture, then this process is repeated with revisions of the
Growth Tactics Implementation Plan in terms of the
performance schedules, or the Growth Tactics Plan or the
Venture Growth
Strategic Plan, or some combination of them or all of them: The Thought Experiment administration and management of
the venture is repeated until an efficacious Business Plan is
developed, or the venture abandoned as having no prospective
viability.
The number years going into
the future for which the Financial Statement must be prepared varied
by industry. However, for brand new ventures, the
minimum time-span into the future for
venture development, which an
entrepreneur must be capable of visualizing, has been determined for
different industries:
Over the years, venture development records and experiences have
enabled the empirical determination of these time-span: The
time-to-turn black from inception of operations or funding -
effectively the time the venture takes, from start of operation, to
elimination the cumulative loses of the operations start-up - is as
listed for the industries as shown in Table 3. The characterization
of "time-to-turn black" obtains the days of manual
Accounting when company that was losing money had its loses written
in red-ink
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Table 3 Time-to-Turn Black by Industry |
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Venture Type |
Years |
Process
Appliances |
7 to 10
3 to 5 |
to signify trouble and profits are
written in black-ink , respectively said to be "in the red" and "in
the black". The Financial Statements for specific industrial
category must be prepared for time-spans extending into the future
that are, at least, the empirical time-to-turn black plus one year;
however, the preferable number of years beyond the
time-to-turn-black is three years.
Given the very
iterative and tedious nature of the preparation of the venture
Pro Forma Financial
Statements, there is therefore the preference for using a
software to avoid the tedium and the iterative analysis due to
scenario-specificity optimization inherent in the
strategic plan during the development of such financials.
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However, one source of the
difficulty in using a software in preparing the Pro Forma Financial
Statements, of course, is that there are not many software
within the budget of the entrepreneur that can effectively allow the
preparation of the Financial Statements in consistence with the design of a preferred organizational structure. Often the
software that is used is not sufficiently adaptable as to satisfy
the custom adopted design of the venture organizational structure
and business processes and consequentially Accounting System.
The entrepreneur therefore is often forced by the software design to
adopting an organizational and business processes designs that are
less than optimal for the venture being developed. Of consideration
in this respect is that the depreciation and amortization formula
the entrepreneur prefers to
adopt as opposed to the formula a specific software offers may be
different.
Sometimes, using software
to avoid the tedium inherent in the iterative preparation of the
financial statements as it is being developed, causes lack of
reconciliation between the Financial Statements and the
Growth Tactics
Business Plan and
Growth Tactics Implementation Plan to comes about. Admittedly,
in those situations, when any reconciliation occurs even with the
use of software, the culprit is most likely that the software being
used is not well-conceptualized and well-developed; of course,
this can get even worse when the entrepreneur has no access to the
developer to further customize the software so as to efficaciously
support the venture structural and processes needs.
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