What Is a Business Plan?

Many of us have been there: That sudden epiphany in the shower or at a bar chatting with friends. The slew of initial ideas hastily scribbled on napkins or perhaps simply forgotten entirely. Many great businesses started with these same events, but millions more never got beyond them. That's because the next step can be both difficult and labor-intensive, namely writing a coherent business plan. Going from random napkin-notes to an organized, thorough plan to get your business started, funded, and generating revenue for the foreseeable future can be a mammoth undertaking, especially for beginners and even more so for people trying to go it alone.

Fortunately, there's plenty of help if you know where to look, especially if what you really need is a written business plan that simply communicates a clear vision. This will help you attract the right people and resources to implement your idea. A business plan tells others how you will get customers and clients, who will run the business, and how early-stage venture capital (VC) will be raised. Business plans help you talk about yourself, explain your strengths, and ask for money to back up your idea.

So, people write business plans in order to acquire funding or to document the company's intended direction. That is, you want a bank loan, VC funding, or other help to get your startup off the ground. A business plan can also be the most concrete way to get everyone's agreement on "This is what we're doing, right?!" Keeping the plan updated as the business matures is an easy way of measuring success.

In all of these cases, the business owner has to do something that can be scary: become a business document management expert by creating a structured document (that is, a business plan) with lots of numbers and compelling prose, with the awareness that this pitch is make-or-break for the company's vision. That's a tough job. It's hard to express your product's unique selling points, analyze competitors' strengths and weaknesses, and back up your assertions about why you need this much money. Believe me, I know. In my pre-journalistic life, I wrote two in-depth business plans. One plan taught me that I didn't have what it took to pull off that project and the other plan got my startup business accepted by a VC conference.

So, when we lack expertise, we should ask for help. Software with "follow the bouncing ball" instructions for business plans can serve the same role as online accounting services because, in each case, you rely on specialists to walk you through the process. Even better, many of the products we review in this business plan creation tool roundup back up their software offerings with in-person coaching and mentoring as well as loads of online learning resources, like videos and how-to articles.

Business Plan Software Options

The 10 online business plan software solutions examined in this roundup—Atlas Business Solutions Ultimate Business Planner 5.0, Enloop, EquityNet, NetEkspert iPlanner.NET, OnePlace, Palo Alto Software LivePlan, PlanGuru, StratPad, Tarkenton GoSmallBiz, and The Business Plan Shop—each promise to help you construct a polished business plan, with all of the numbers and narrative you need. So, whether you want to start your own accounting firm, real estate operation, or e-commerce business, you'll be all ready to go.

All of these online business plan software solutions certainly do deliver on their promise to help you, and none of them are bad choices. However, a few of them provide additional services such as connecting you to funding sources (EquityNet gets a nod here) or comparing your plan to others' plans in your industry (such as what Enloop's performance score does). Ultimately, though, the two Editors' Choice winners were clear: Palo Alto Software LivePlan and Tarkenton GoSmallBiz, both of which checked off most boxes on a typical entrepreneur's wish list.

These Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications can't give you the irresistible prose to convince an investor you will make your projections come true, but they do guide you in answering all of the questions that investor is likely to have. Here are eight key factors to look for when choosing a business plan software solution for your business:

1. Business Plan Structure

Business plans have a lot of elements, some of which won't occur to someone who hasn't written one before. Ideally, the business planning software solution will walk you through each section that is appropriate for your class of business, ensuring you answer all of the relevant questions. These solutions may prompt you to respond to issues that you might not have thought to address.

2. Do the Numbers

Ultimately, a business plan shows how your company will make money. Even the simplest plan needs to include financial reports such as charts for profit-and-loss, balance sheets, and month-by-month and yearly projections.

3. Context and Analysis

Some business plan software solutions (such as EquityNet and Editors' Choice Palo Alto Software LivePlan) help you compare your numbers to others in your industry, including regions and company size. You might claim that the Jewish deli you propose to open in Asheville, North Carolina will turn a profit in three years, but the market data suggests five years is typical. This data helps you back up your assertions before a banker can raise an eyebrow. This is a "nice-to-have" feature for some businesses but an irrelevant one for others.

4. Helpful Advice

Even if the business plan software solution gives you places to plug in data (think "Mad Libs" for businesses), ultimately you need a good idea (you're on your own, there) and to understand the information investors want to see. As with tax preparation software, it's reassuring when the business planning software solution defines terms, provides sample data, and explains the sort of information expected in each field. StratPad's educational videos are a model for how this sort of thing should work.

5. Report Depth and Presentation

The result of all of this work is a business plan, a document for others to read. These don't always need to be works of art but it helps if the business plan software solution packages your business plan attractively and permits customization. Don't treat these tools as all-in-one solutions to your problems. Set your expectations correctly and you'll find these business plan software solutions to be far more helpful.

6. Treat the Business Plan as a Work-In-Process

Collect everything you think is necessary before getting started. But I promise you that, at least once while you use these business plan software solutions, you will say, "Gee, I don't know; I have to look it up." That's a good thing as it means the software is asking for relevant information you didn't think to include on your own.

For any but the simplest of proposals, it's an iterative process. So, you need to highlight the parts to come back to (after your accountant responds, for example). Or, the software should at least save data in some kind of draft status. However, across all of these apps, some forms insist you must enter something in a field before it will save everything on the page, which is irksome. Worse, it could lead to errors because you might not remember to go back and fix the temporary guess. I kept wishing for a way to bookmark "temporary" data that needs to be double-checked ("I'll write in 800 for now…"); the best answer to this was Palo Alto Software LivePlan's comment field but it would be nice to see a business planning software solution that let me mark a field as "Don't forget."

7. You Still Need a Spreadsheet

In general, these business plan software solutions will act as though you are reasonably organized before you log into their websites wherein you will paste summary information. However, based on my hands-on experience, I advise you to still expect to do background math yourself. For instance, if you need to fill in the projected head count for marketing for the next five years and you keep adjusting the number of people to hire (based on your spreadsheet guesswork), expect to keep manually updating the total in the software rather than having the data automatically sync. In other words, these business plan software solutions are helpers, not "I will do the thinking for you" kind of apps. And this is okay, as long as you don't expect them to be something they're not.

These are all SaaS apps, some of which have a free version with the basics as well as a paid version with more feature depth. If your needs are incredibly simple and you just need "fill-in-the-blanks" forms to give to a banker, then you may find several completely free options that do the trick.

8. A Plan for All Businesses

These business plan software solutions must be relevant for everyone, from a solo entrepreneur trying to open a small to midsize accounting firm to an established manufacturing company aiming to fund a new factory. To judge suitability to task, I used data from two real business plans: a New Jersey restaurant startup and a nine-year-old horror film festival. I also measured the software against the business plan I once wrote with the help of professional advisors (back when I sought significant VC).

All of these business plan software solutions are good apps; none of them gravely disappoint. However, Palo Alto Software LivePlan and Tarkenton GoSmallBiz were head and shoulders above the rest. It won PCMag's admiration based on the clarity and understandability of their documentation and the impressive depth of their features and options. However, each of the 10 business plan software solutions reviewed has strengths that may make one a better choice over another for your business. So, look at all of the options to see which one is the best fit for you.