Help Halp meh! Anyone with business planning xp

[Ezteq]

Hellooo,

Sorry to bug you all (yet again lol) with questions and doings but for my latest assignment I am having to write a business plan and do a section about costings and depreciation for the things I will need to implement my new service.

So the stuff I have to include is staff hours, room booking fees, costs of refreshments and DVD depreciation...I don't know if I'd have to include the cost of furnature or if that coems with the room...basically its a huge pain in my arse right now and any advice anyone can offer would be just super!



If anyone can suggest any good websites or templates or just how to get your head rund it really any advice at all, I would be really really grateful...I'm desperate to get this done because whenever I get my grades I get a chinese and I haven't had one for ages and seeing as I'm being deprived of certain other elements of life for the forseeable future you have no idea just how much damage I could do to a takeaway right now...it really is a matter of life, death and spare ribs!

 

[Vae]

Prepare a business plan | Business Link

From the sound of it the business you are proposing is some kind of training sessions so your costs are:

Variable per session:

-Staff to run the sessions (plus any travel costs)
-Room hire for the session (I would expect this to include furniture but there may be additional charges for equipment beyond table and chairs such as TV/DVD, Projector hire etc. It may prove worthwhile making the point that there will be a point at which the cost of buying the additional equipment becomes cheaper than hiring it)

Variable per attendee
-Refreshments (for the trainer and the people attending)
-Training materials e.g. handouts or similar

Fixed:
-Cost of any equipment that you purchase or DVD's to be shown. These costs would be depreciated (i.e. written off) over the length of time you expect to be using them i.e. if you plan to use a DVD for 2 years you depreciate the cost over the 2 years, normally by month but you may decide
to do it per session for the purpose of the business plan.

Hope that helps. If you can give more info we might be able to be of more help.

 

[Ezteq]

Prepare a business plan | Business Link

From the sound of it the business you are proposing is some kind of training sessions so your costs are:

Variable per session:

-Staff to run the sessions (plus any travel costs)
-Room hire for the session (I would expect this to include furniture but there may be additional charges for equipment beyond table and chairs such as TV/DVD, Projector hire etc. It may prove worthwhile making the point that there will be a point at which the cost of buying the additional equipment becomes cheaper than hiring it)

Variable per attendee
-Refreshments (for the trainer and the people attending)
-Training materials e.g. handouts or similar

Fixed:
-Cost of any equipment that you purchase or DVD's to be shown. These costs would be depreciated (i.e. written off) over the length of time you expect to be using them i.e. if you plan to use a DVD for 2 years you depreciate the cost over the 2 years, normally by month but you may decide
to do it per session for the purpose of the business plan.

Hope that helps. If you can give more info we might be able to be of more help.

Vae...dude! Thank you lol I was not expecting this this is great!

There are just a couple of things that still will not sink in...

So if there is a table in the room (for example) and it cost £25 would I have to include that whole cost in my total costings or just a proportion per session? (and then I'd have to put into the budget an allowance to actually buy a new table or is that only with more perishable items?)

The other thing is floor space, my resource pack has an example where we include the cost of the premisis (basically my service is like a book club but with dvds, they don't watch them at meetings just talk about them, the meetings are held once a month in a meeting room in the library...which is the main organisation I work for) but she does it by dividing the actual floor space used I do not know if this is standard procedure of if you could just say how much the room usually costs to book per hour and then use that in the costing?

I do not know if this makes any sense to you at all...I wrote it and it doesn't make much sense to me so! Thanks for the advice so far though, very helpful you are

 

[Vae]

Vae...dude! Thank you lol I was not expecting this this is great!

There are just a couple of things that still will not sink in...

So if there is a table in the room (for example) and it cost £25 would I have to include that whole cost in my total costings or just a proportion per session? (and then I'd have to put into the budget an allowance to actually buy a new table or is that only with more perishable items?)

The other thing is floor space, my resource pack has an example where we include the cost of the premisis (basically my service is like a book club but with dvds, they don't watch them at meetings just talk about them, the meetings are held once a month in a meeting room in the library...which is the main organisation I work for) but she does it by dividing the actual floor space used I do not know if this is standard procedure of if you could just say how much the room usually costs to book per hour and then use that in the costing?

I do not know if this makes any sense to you at all...I wrote it and it doesn't make much sense to me so! Thanks for the advice so far though, very helpful you are

I'll hedge a little and say any advice I'm giving is in general and may not be specific to your particular circumstances because it will depend on the guidelines and rules you have been given. You say that this is for an assignment so I presume it is for a qualification and you get marked on it so you need to tailor a plan to meet the guidelines you have been given. They may not be interested in things like tax for example.

With any equipment that you buy e.g. the table you mention, you would evaluate the likely lifetime of the asset so for a table this would be 5 years (in general accounting) and you would include a proportion of this (depreciation) each year or each session based on how long you expect it to last before you replace it.

You need to know what your room hire charge includes. I would generally expect it to include table and chairs at a minimum. Floor space would only seem to be relevent in deciding the max people per session and I would have thought that chairs would be a better guide for that.

As an example:

Per meeting
Income:
10 people @£3 each = £30

Total £30

Expenditure:
Room Hire £10
Refreshments (@£0.50 x 11 people (inc staff member) £5.50
Staff member £10
DVD depreciation £3

Total £28.50

Profit £1.50 per session

The DVD depreciation will be based on the cost of the DVD's divided over the lifetime (or number of sessions they will be used for). It's a bit awkward to say without knowing the plan. Is the idea to buy 10 DVD's, everyone borrows one to watch and then comes together for a session to discuss it before moving onto a new DVD? If so then you would need to have say 10 groups use that set of DVD's. So you would have the cost of 10 DVD's divided by 10 sessions which they are used in (so the cost of 1 DVD per session instead of the £3 I show above).

In effect I'm saying you need to give the details of your exact plan and how it will work then you can work out the costs of doing it and work out how much you would need to charge, how many people are likely to take it up and thus the profit you are likely to make.

Then you can evaluate stuff like the initial capital outlay (buying all those DVD's), the payback period (how long it will take to repay this outlay excluding depreciation), Profit per year, Return on investment etc depending on how detailed you want to go.

 

[Thorwyn]

I just wrote a business plan for my company a couple of months ago. I can email you the pages with the "numbers" if you want, just need a day or two to translate them. My plan was prettys detailed, so I guess it will work for any other company and/or country. Drop me your email addy (in a PM or here) and I`ll send it to you asap.

 

[Ezteq]

oi vae! hehe sorry I couldn't resist the pun lol, thank's again for the help, as you pointed out yes it's an assignment so a bit different from a 'real' BP but the info you've given me so far is really useful for me to get an idea of how certain things work, cheers again matey really appreciate it