ToolsFP&AModelingForecasting

Forecastr

How to use Forecastr to build financial projections

Forecastr is a platform for creating financial projections and managing your growing company. Create a hiring plan, expense forecast, and revenue projections, manage your runway, and create dashboards for yourself and your investors, all in a web app. Run scenarios to test assumptions and see how new revenue lines or expense items will impact your cash and runway. Forecastr is powered by your data from Quickbooks, Xero, Hubspot, and Stripe to help you continually update your model helps you regularly use and update your model for yourself and your stakeholders.

How to use

Foresight users get a 25% discount off Forecastr. The best way to get started and claim the discount is to complete the onboarding form which will help Forecastr learn more about you and whether it's a good fit for your needs. You can also directly book a discovery call here, where they will demo Forecastr and intro to how they work with companies.

Forecastr offers a concierge onboarding service that will help you take any existing model you are using and build you a model that accomplishes the same goals in Forecastr, and also provides ongoing support to help you manage your Forecastr model.

Comparing Foresight to Forecastr

Foresight provides a range of free and paid tools primarily built in spreadsheets (Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets) to help you create financial projections to use for business planning and fundraising, and can work with actual financials from any accounting software you use to continually update your projections and understand how your budget compared to your actual results. The tools can be used for any type of business at any stage, and you have the ability to edit and update however you want, whenever you want, in spreadsheet programs used by millions of people.

Just as I've worked to update the financial model templates over time to make them better for users, I've always worked towards my larger goal in helping people understand how to build financial models to make meaningful business decisions, using any model they are using, spreadsheets and web apps.

Forecastr offers the ability to forecast your revenues and expenses, hiring plan and capital needs, and create proforma financial statements and charts to help you understand your business. Connect to services like Quickbooks, Xero, Hubspot, and Stripe to pull in new data and regularly update your forecast, and create scenario analyses to understand how changing key assumptions, adding new business lines, or changing your expenses will impact your business.

Should you use a spreadsheet or a web app?

I don’t believe it’s an either/or choice between spreadsheets and web apps for managing a company’s financials. There are situations and stages in a company’s growth where spreadsheets are sufficient, or are better for specific analyses, and there are situations where web tools can provide a better user experience for building financial models to manage a company’s financials. Finance is a function that is just beginning to see the explosion of tools and platforms that we have seen for product development, design, management, collaboration, communication, and human resources, and I’m excited to see the innovation in the space.

More web tools for building financial models at Alternative to Foresight →