Customer Reviews

Palo Alto Business Plan Pro 2007 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a fantastic product that really walks you through setting up a business plan step-by-step. It calculates things in the background and basically prepares a professional-looking document for you. You'll be surprised what you are able to throw together in just a few days, and it really gives you a sense of accomplishment, which may be lacking in the early days of a startup. The customer service is pretty good. They usually get back to you the same day if you send them an e-mail, though they can be a bit short with you if your question is too obvious to them. They're not long on explanation, though, so if you're looking for a more thorough understanding of the product you won't get it there.

The major objection I have to this product, though, is the formatting of the actual plan. Though it's licensed by Microsoft Word, it really doesn't have any of Word's tools, and so there are all kinds of spacing and margin problems that arise for which there is no cure. If you're a regular Word user, you'll expect to be able to do certain things to the text you're working on and believe me, you can't! I'd say about 40% of Word's features are included in BPP. If you export it to Word, you can use Word's tools there, but it doesn't export that well, you can't re-import, and it's basically just a very clunky proccess. So this product is great for setting up your report, but lousy for finishing it. Plan on having to re-format a lot of your plan before actually presenting it to anyone if you care at all about aesthetics and complicated things like page breaks.

Over all this software is very good.

The software does crash. But not as often as other reviews make it appear. Also, I had to download the latest update manually because it couldn't auto-magically figure out my internet connection is persistent.

My experience with this can be summed up easily. It is easy to use, when you have a question or you are at a loss, the answer is already on the screen or one click away.

This software was obviously designed with end users in mind. It has a simple layout and it just couldn't be easier to use in my opinion.

The reports look professional and clean. I find it hard to believe others were complaining about the final reports. If the reports generated aren't clean and/or professional enough, I would have to say someone is living in a fantasy world. No banker, angel, or VC wants to see animated gifs or pinstripes on a business plan. Please get a grip on reality before you attempt to start a business!

All the numbers are integrated and calculated so they are consistent across the entire business plan. If you had to do that manually you would be screwed every time you made a revision to a single entry. You would have to find where that entry was calculated across your entire plan and make the changes everywhere... This feature ALONE is worth the price of admission!

The software comes with two books also. No, not user manuals. Books that help you understand more about starting a business and how to plan appropriately.

I can see why this is highly recommended. I will recommend it to anyone who is serious about starting a business and wants to validate their assumptions or get funding.

This is the second or third business plan builder I have used, and it may be the best I've seen for putting together a plan in a logical, cohesive process. But it is by far the WORST piece of software I have ever used for formatting output and ending up with a polished, professional-looking finished product. This application is diseased with problems in spacing, indentation, tabs, bullets, numbering, and anything else that may be imported from Word or applied within this program. The MS Word export function flat-out CRASHED my MSWord XP Professional, and anything imported from Word ended up with a mind of its own once it hit Business Plan Pro. So here I am with a nice, tidy little business plan -- but I have to completely re-do it in Word and Excel or look like an idiot when I hand it out in presentations.

As much as I appreciate this product's ability to walk one through a business plan, what good is the plan if it is irreversibly locked into an ugly, inconsistent, un-fixable format for printing?

Very solid. It helped me with the formalization of the thought process to building a business plan. It is missing a critical tool for building an organizational chart.

While it appears to be used for generating organizational capital or bank loans, it is helpful even if this is not the need.

I also bought the Marketing Plan Pro which was much more helpful to me as an orgainizational plan.

Harry Turner

Good product but need better, more complete business plan sample for video production.

By the way, do not buy the product from Amazon if you need the product right away. They use UPS that is not reliable for fast delivery.

This is a great program that could make anyone look like a genuis business-plan writer. I did not have any problems with it crashing at all. I would say that before using, you might want to do a lot of research on your business and also have some knowledge of how the financial statements work. For startup businesses, you want to have an estimate on all your expenses, the cash you would need, your maket analysis, and for existing businesses the same plus your current expenses and revunues.

What worked for me was also saving a lot of the information as I went along. The software is lengthy, but there is a way to delete those extras that you don't want on there. What's great about it is that you just put in your estimated numbers and it does all the math for you and all the graphs as well. I strongly recommend. However, for someone just starting their first business and who have not been familiar with these documents and procedures, it might be challenging. One good thing though, is that it gives you examples that you can take from so you're not doing it alone at all.

I too have been having problems with this program. Like state above the program would just shut down (sometimes with several error messages) but unlike stated above, this crash happens everytime I start the program up. At first it was working fine but then a week or so after installment it started shutting done for no reason and I can't get it to stay running for more then a few seconds at a time. this program has given me nothing but problems since i got it.

I inserted jpg figures in my plan and then tried to export the plan to Word XP. The file was corrupt; Word could open it but could not close it; it caused Word to crash. I had to export as rtf, open the file in Word, and then save as a Word Doc. Also, when printing a business plan as a pdf, the face page, confidentiality agreement, and table of contents end up at the end of the document. The same thing happened for rtf exports. To get all the pages in the right order, you need to print from within the print preview screen.

This program suprised me. Not only was the Business Plan easy to create, external help was offered with hyper links and additional resource material. There were also two great books that came with the program that was an added bonus. I am very pleased that Palo Alto took the extra step to ensure that their customers can create a rock solid business plan.

BPP 2006 ran fine on xp for me. I transferred it to my new laptop with vista and could not run it. when I tried to start it, the message "unexpected error, quitting" kept coming up. I decided it wasn't ready for vista so I upgraded to 2007. Same problem. I spent a day with tech support through email trying to fix it. I "repaired" it through control panel, uninstalled and reinstalled, ran as an administrator, updated windows, ran spybot and ad-aware. At least four clean installs and twice I ran Palo Alto's diagnostic program.

It still doesn't work. Maybe it's my machine but I don't think so - I've never had that error message before and I run everything from Word to Photoshop to Vegas 7 video editing. So - try it before you buy it.