The Business Plan Shop provides a serviceable business plan creation tool, which begins at $22 for a three-month subscription. Aside from creating the plan, the software is also capable of forecasting for three to five years. The application does a good job of walking entrepreneurs and business owners through collecting financial projections and descriptive text, and then generates an attractive business plan document. However, unlike much of the competition, the app doesn't provide much guidance on what exactly to write in your business plan, which puts it somewhat behind our Editors' Choice winners in this category, Palo Alto Software LivePlan and Tarkenton GoSmallBiz. There are two steps to create a business plan using the Business Plan Shop. In one module, you write about your company and its goals. The text editor asks you to describe the business, its market, and the company's financial highlights, with more detail solicited on products, competition, strategy, and operations. The other module is a financial section which prompts you for information about your business lines, overhead, investments, and capital including the nature of the investment you seek. This section includes data about your products and services as well as their sales projections and expenses. The numbers are totaled as you go so that you see the progress of the plan construction and its financial feasibility. It's all organized in a tabbed user interface (UI) that feels more "desktop-ish" than "webpage-ish." I kept closing sections only to realize I should have switched to another tab before clicking Save. Some entrepreneurs may be more comfortable working that way, but for this longtime Web user, the UI was a little off-putting. Financial Forecasting The Business Plan Shop's financial forecasting section collects product and service information by month, for three or five years out. Cost of goods sold is tied to the sales forecasts so you can play with your predictions in brainstorming mode and ask questions such as "What if we raised the unit price? What would be the impact if we could negotiate Net-60 from our suppliers?" You also can adjust Accounts Payable payment terms, giving you visibility into cash flow. While you still need a spreadsheet at hand, the Business Plan Shop's way of organizing income and expenses permits a lot more number-fiddling than does its competitors. Some people rely heavily on examples and help text. A business owner may be intimidated by how to express himself or herself (e.g., "What do they expect me to write here?!") or stymied by the financial terms bankers use (e.g., "What do they mean by this term?") and thus may hope the software includes education and "attaboy" reassurances in addition to fields to fill in. It's here that you may be disappointed in The Business Plan Shop as its samples and instructions are minimal. They certainly are adequate for someone who knows the language of investors but its help text is unlikely to reassure a newbie. (I've got my copy of the book, How to Prepare and Present a Business Plan, which I bought in 1984, so I'm good. You might need to do some reading as well.) One plus: The Business Plan Shop's application has a lot of categories. Depending on the amount of prodding you desire, that may help with your "But what do I say?!" freak-out moment or help alleviate that feeling of being overwhelmed. Instead of a dialog box and one big text box prompting, "Write about the marketing plan here," the Business Plan Shop goes into more depth. For example, you're reminded to write about the company's barriers at entry or industry and government regulations. The Operations section asks for a personnel plan, key assets, intellectual property (IP), and suppliers. The text accompanying the financial plan asks you to note the business assumptions (such as the market size and projected cash flow). All of these mean that the Business Plan Shop's application makes you think through important issues, even if it can't help you come up with the right answers or (as some of its competitors do) suggest how your business compares to others in the same field. Despite the number of its questions, you don't need to write about absolutely everything. Just like Enloop allows, I liked that the Business Plan Shop allows you to control which text sections to include or exclude so that your plan can leave out a section on, say, government regulations if the topic is irrelevant to your new quilt shop. Its Editor Supports More The editor supports more than plain text so you can use italics, HTML links, and images. Some text sections also permit you to insert dynamically updated elements from elsewhere in the plan such as a Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) chart or yearly Profit and Loss (P&L) table. However, the software is tuned for a new venture. It doesn't ask about past performance in an existing business as doing so might let you assure an investor that, since you've been selling these items for five years, you're primed to sell even more of them now after your successful research and development (R&D). The Financial Overheads section gives you a starting list of the expenses to pay in order to keep the lights on (e.g., travel, utilities, and office supplies) as well as their payment terms (with an eye towards cash flow management). This section is completely customizable. So, if you want to track items specific to your line of business, it's easy to add or edit them. The software lets you download the generated business plan as a PDF file or Microsoft Word file, just like StratPad lets you do. The plan the Business Plan Shop generates does a good job of presenting the text you entered, and incorporating the financial analysis charts and graphs that reflect all of those numbers you painstakingly typed in. The document won't blow you away with its beauty as the sleek-finished documents created by EquityNet do but it's well-organized and easy for an investor to understand, which is ultimately what matters. The Business Plan Shop gets top marks for its ability to tune data and plan sections to an entrepreneur's needs. It's good for some brainstorming, especially for a new business. But the application offers lightweight assistance in the "follow the bouncing ball" approach to building a plan. There's no reason not to choose this application—except that Editors' Choices Palo Alto Software LivePlan and Tarkenton GoSmallBiz outperform it. Bottom Line: The Business Plan Shop provides a good-enough business plan writing aid, but mainly for people who know what needs to be in the document. Beginners or those looking for plan writing guidance will need to keep looking.

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