Cheap Business Plan Pro 2003 Premier (Software) (Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows Me) Price

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Customer Reviews of Business Plan Pro 2003 Premier

Think about spending hours formatting your plan. You want to show the most important figures and text in bold and you use different colors to make reading easier and more atractive. Imagine that you are finally finished. You like what you see on the screen and your plan is ready to be printed and shown to your shareholders, bankers, bosses or grandma.

To your surprise, none of your formatting is printed. BPP is not a "what you see on the screen is what you get on the printed version" type of program. It is more a "what Palo Alto wants to show is shown without caring about what the customer needs to highlight" type of program.

So, unless you can convince grandma to browse through your plan on your computer, don't bother formatting your tables. It is a waste of time that won't be shown to anyone that wants to read your plan in a piece of paper.

If that happens with formatting, picture the trouble that it is to write a business plan that needs some complicated formulas to forecast sales and expenses or to measure profitability in a certain way and have the program crash every now and then in the middle of the programming.

I would not complain if only Palo Alto had advertised its product as a "game" or as a business tool not suited for those pressed by a deadline or for those who want to use formatting as a way to enhance a business plan. Then, I would not have expected much for what I payed.

The best by far
I've followed business planning software for years, I've done lots of plans for myself and clients, and I've worked with people at all stages of development. This one, the Premier version of Business Plan Pro, is definitely the best for the informed user, who wants a lot of customizability and power.

For example, this one lets you create virtually unlimited Excel-compatible worksheets, which have Excel-compatible functions, and can be linked to and from the main already-built financial model. Specific example: you don't want to do your own set of linked financial tables (i.e. assumptions, break-even, sales, personnel, profit and loss, cash flow, balance sheet, ratios) but you want to do more detail in long-term assets than what the standard built-in model allows. Just add a worksheet, put all the detail you want, and you can go to the preconfigured main worksheets and link out to the new one.

Not that this is a template for Excel; it isn't, you don't need to have Excel to work with, it has its own Excel-compatible worksheets.

What this means is that I get the power of starting with the main worksheets, which I know work well, and are documented and error-proofed, correct accounting and all, but I can also add in whatever else I need. Flexibility is critical.

Which reminds me that the text portion of the plan is very nicely flexible for adding and deleting topics and tables, which is also essential for real business plans. The text portion of the plan is a lot easier to use and work with than straight Microsoft Word, although, to be honest, you do have to make compromises ... Word has more power and flexibility for straight word processing, but with this one what you get is clearly good enough -- it's a business plan, not a magazine layout -- and if you can deal with not having every bell and whistle then you can move topics and subtopics about, and link and unlink tables and charts, much easier than if you were really working with raw Word and Excel.

I think of this as the best of both ... I get all the power and flexibility I need, but if I stay within Business PLan Pro I also have a great starting point, financials that will always link and be doing cash flow correctly, but it is designed to do exactly that, business planning, and nothing else. And in the end, what it prints out automatically is very much good enough, even if I don't get to put colored lines into the footers or resize graphics. I can import graphics easily enough, although I do need to resize them correct before I import them.

This version also has some really cool collaboration features, an email system that lets me work with a client and receive portions of the plan and incorporate them into the working plan without worrying about wiping out what I intended to save. I've also used its template system to make a subset of the full plan, export it as a template, and send it to a client to fill out. He then sent it back, and I was able to absorb it back into the main plan.

I use Windows XP in the office and Windows 2000 at home, and I have had no problems with operating systems. I have contacted support once or twice, to be honest I was annoyed with for one question that they referred me to the manual, but then I discovered that the manual is built into the software, so it's right there, and they had the page number correct, and it was a pretty good explanation.

If you simply want to get through a business plan quickly, Business Plan Pro is the same basic plan and interface (both of them have lots of business planning content built in, lots of help and instructions, etc) for less money. If you know what you're doing and you want power and even more flexibility, the Premier is worth the difference. I use Premier myself but I will recommend the Business PLan Pro version instead when I have clients who are afraid of the whole thing.

So I guess I'm making this too long, but I really recommend this product.

If you are planning with a team, this is the solution
Three of us were pulling together our business plan as a group. We all were in different locations. The capabilities of Business Plan Pro "Premier" were amazing. It allowed us to all work on the plan simultaneously and then combine our work into a "master" plan and keep our individual "localized" plans in tact.

This software and the features it offers saved our group hours of time in creating our business plan. It is also a great tool to update our plan and selectively share it with others, either online or via email.