Financial Templates

Financial Templates are the lifeblood of my work!

What is so great about financial templates? They save time! That's their most important benefit to me. But the vast majority of people who do not have the pleasure of working as accountants all day long, financial templates simply provide a tool they can get things accomplished with.

Let's look more closely at what I mean:

Financial Templates as Time Savers

I have templates for almost everything I do. What that means is that whenever I need any kind of a form or a spreadsheet, I first look for something I already created in the past and use it as a starting point. That's what a template is.

I never have to reinvent the wheel. And as a professional accountant, you can imagine how many different "wheels" I use every day! Profit & Loss statements, Balance Sheets, Cash Flow Forecasts, Time Sheets, Break-Even Analyses, Margin Calculations, Business Plans, etc, etc.

When using your own prior work as a financial template, you get another benefit - you are so familiar with the template that it takes you no time to figure out how to use it. And each time you refine it just a little bit more. So pretty soon your templates run like a Swiss watch! All the bugs have been worked out, you have tested it with many different clients and many different business scenarios and you know you have something you can depend on.

Financial Templates as Tools

For someone who is not a finance professional, financial templates serve a slightly different purpose. They still save time, of course, but they also provide a tool that person would have to pay someone else to develop.

Once this person has a financial template, they can use it to create forms the template will simply guide them through. The mere fact that the template has certain line items - like the Balance Sheet, for example, forces you to think in a well-organized fashion and gather the information according to the structure of the template - cash balances, accounts receivable, fixed assets, liabilities, etc.

The same goes for a Business Plan. A well-designed financial template can steer you away from making some fundamental mistakes. A client of mine brought me a self-prepared Business Plan once and we both smiled at the many line items he had on his Profit & Loss statement which really belonged on a Balance Sheet. With a professionally designed template, he wouldn't have made that mistake.

Support for Financial Templates

I have yet to meet a client who didn't need some kind of modification to the template he used for his Business Plan or even his Balance Sheet! And with most financial templates available on line, there simply isn't any support. What's more, many of the templates I've seen look like they have been created by people who have Excel knowledge, but are not necessarily accountants. And so you have many small things which simply aren't right. As a non-accountant you wouldn't even notice them. For example, you may not know the difference between an equity section of a Balance Sheet for a sole proprietor and an LLC.

That's why I decided to offer support with the templates on my site. I'm looking forward to helping you save time as I do, every day!

Lucy Rudnicka is a former Corporate Controller. She now owns her own Accounting Services firm and specializes in small business bookkeeping as well as part-time Controller services.

Get a good start on your Business Plan or your financial projections - use professionally designed financial templates. Lucy Rudnicka offers accounting support with her templates. She can also help you customize them to fit your particular needs.

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