Customer Reviews

Palo Alto Business Plan Premier 2006

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On the positive side: the program runs as advertised on Windows XP. The heart of the program is seven interlinked spreadsheets that give basic financial highlights in spreadsheets and graphs: plan highlights, break-even analysis, projected profit/loss, cash flow, balance sheet, ratio analysis, and sales forecast. I bought the Premier edition (at $100 more) because it was said to allow importing Excel spreadsheets, which it does: but the less expensive version lets you cut-and-paste Excel spreadsheets and gives you the same results (unless you have some esoteric formulas that you use repeatedly to compute scenarios).

The support materials are voluminous: you get to read a book while you are working on your business plan, in case you don't have an M.B.A.

The negative side is the lack of control over formating and inability to import Acrobat.pdf files. You cannot print a section in landscape (except for the tables that the authors have put into landscape format), as you can do in Word/Excel documents (by declaring non-continuous sections). I wrote to the company about inability to import .pdf files, and the respondent muttered something about Adobe security issues. In regard to formating, you can control basic issues such as font, size, style, etc.; but you cannot insert page breaks, section breaks; and the font formating is somewhat cumbersome.

The program comes marketed with a sister program, Marketing Plan Pro, which I have not yet evaluated. Overall, I found Business Plan Pro Premier to be helpful, except for the $100 extra for "importing" Excel spreadsheets in the "Premier" version. Buy the cheaper version and you'll come out ahead of me.

If you are writing a business plan than you need this! It helps you get organized and gives you plenty of ideas when you get stuck. I can't imagine writing a biz plan without this!