ideas to numbers .. simple financial projections
The business life cycle model uses 4 stages start-up, growth, maturity, and decline to define the different phases a business will experience in its lifetime. Each stage comes with its own characteristics and problems to solve, and the business must determine which stage has been reached in order to be able to plan and forecast effectively.
A business can fund it’s operations from both internal (retained earnings) and external (debt and injected capital) sources. The retained earnings to total assets ratio is the ratio of the accumulated retained profits of the business compared to its total assets, and is an indication of the percentage of assets funded by internal resources.
Angel funding is used to provide a startup business with equity investment to fund growth. The angel investor is seeking higher returns for the risks involved and tries to limit the initial valuation placed on the business in order to maximize their equity percentage.
The availability of finance for a startup business determines its ability to expand and grow. By using bootstrap finance the growth will be slower but the value of the business needed to meet the personal financial goal of the entrepreneur will be smaller.
Crowdfunding is a technique for a business to obtain finance in which small amounts of funding are raised from a large number of people (the crowd). Crowdfunding can be either rewards, debt or equity based depending on the requirements of the business.
This monthly lease payment calculator works out the monthly payment (Pmt) needed at the end of each month taking into account the cost of the asset (C), its residual value (R), the lease interest rate (i), the number of payments (n), and the number of advance payments (a) required by the lease agreement.
The 5 C’s of credit is one technique used by financial institutions to assess the credit worthiness and risks associated with lending to a business seeking debt finance. An understanding of the five C’s of credit combined with financial projections, will allow a business to be better prepared when approaching lenders for debt funding.
There is a wide variety of funding available for a startup business, but one of the fundamental decisions which must be made by the entrepreneur is whether or not to seek outside equity and long term debt finance to fund growth or to rely on bootstrapping finance methods such as founders equity, short term debt, and revenue to grow the business.