Note, this sheet was deprecated in v5 of the Standard Model base.
The Standard Financial Model by default supports any transaction or subscription business, and can support modeling up to hundreds of different subscription plans, products, SKUs, enterprise clients, projects, or more, using the Pricing sheet.
One of the biggest questions people face is how to model multiple subscription plans or multiple products. Generally, I advise modeling at an “average order” or “average subscription” level until you have the data or decision-making process with an operational business to utilize the additional level of detail behind modeling each product, SKU, subscription plan, or customer type. The Standard Model and its variants support both of these types through the “average” or “multiple” selection on Get Started; if you find yourself bogged down in detail, start simpler and build out more detail when you can take advantage of it.
If you do want to model multiple products or subscription types, this is where the Pricing sheet comes in.
How it works
This sheet is prelinked into the model through the Forecasting Drivers to create an average revenue per subscriber/user/etc. to feed into the core revenue calculations on Forecast. It is only used if, on the revenues asumptions on Get Started, you select "multiple" as the option for calculating average revenue for one or more of the channels or conversion steps.
If selected, the assumptions for the average disappear, and the settings inside the model change automatically to use the average revenues generated from Pricing.
Inputs
The inputs here allow you to:
- Use one row for each unique product or subscription you want to model.
- Select the conversion step or channel that each product or subscription applies to
- Input the date the product is first offered, it's price, and use the forecasting methods to change the price over time, if needed.
- Input the number of this product purchased per order/subscriber/etc. (also called incidence rates). For subscriptions, you wil generally want the total for all subscriptions per type to add up to 1 or 100%, for transaction businesses, it could be > 1 as people can buy more than 1 product per order. The model also has a yes/no dropdown where you can select whether you want the per order/subscriber/etc. to sum to 1 or not, and the model will automatically adjust the per product rates accordingly.
- Input the cost of goods sold per product or subscription
This creates:
- An average revenue per order or average monthly revenue per subscription that reflects the weighted average of price and incidence rates. If "Multiple" is selected on
Get Started, this will be used in the revenue forecast - An average cost of sales per order or per month, that reflects the weighted average of cost of sales and incidence rates
- Unit sales/subscriptions per month, per product/subscription
- Revenues per product/subscription, per momnth
- Cost of sales per product/subscription, per month
The average cost of sales is automatically calculated as a forecasting driver, which you may then access to lay out your cost of sales in the expenses section on the Forecast sheet.
The revenues and cost of sales are not used in the revenue forecast, but if desired, you can link these into the revenues section on the Forecast sheet if you want to display that data at that level, or if you want to mix the revenues into difference categories.
This structurally assumes the same churn cycles, repeat cycles, growth per product or subscription per channel or conversion step. To create separate forecasts of this, create multiple sales channels with different revenue calculations, contact me.
Common Modifications
No common edits to this sheet other than inserting additional rows to cover additional SKUs or subscriptions.