LivePlan

LivePlan is a business planning and financial management application from Palo Alto Software, the company based in Eugene, Oregon, that also created Business Plan Pro. The product is designed to help business owners plan with confidence from the outset and to manage their companies strategically as they grow. It addresses the fact that many entrepreneurs find writing a business plan and building financial forecasts intimidating, particularly without accounting expertise, and that plans are often abandoned once written rather than used as living tools to guide decisions and measure performance.

The planning module guides users step by step through writing a business plan, with prompts, examples and hundreds of sample plans from a wide range of industries, and it produces professional documents suitable for lenders, investors and grant applications. Pitch tools help users create a concise summary of their business concept. The financial forecasting module builds revenue, expense, personnel, loan and cash flow projections through a guided interface, automatically generating profit and loss statements, balance sheets and cash flow statements without requiring complex spreadsheet work. Once the business is operating, LivePlan connects with QuickBooks Online and Xero to import actual results, allowing users to compare performance against forecasts, track key metrics and identify variances. Dashboards visualise revenue, expenses, cash and profitability trends, and benchmarking against industry data helps owners understand how their performance compares with similar businesses. Scenario planning allows users to test the effect of changes in assumptions. The product has added AI-assisted features to help draft plan content and interpret financial data. Collaboration settings enable advisers, accountants and team members to contribute. LivePlan is used by startups, small business owners, entrepreneurs seeking funding, business advisers, accountants, incubators, accelerators and educational institutions that teach entrepreneurship. As a cloud service, it runs in any browser without installation. Pricing starts from around USD 20 per month; there is no free trial and no permanently free version.