Mar Sheet Template Form: Fill & Download for Free

How might you expect the practice of accounting to be different in another country?Different countries have different rules on recording and reporting. Just a few examples:Fixed account numbers according to local law, eg France.Mandatory financial year. Some countries Jan to Dec, some Apr to Mar, others, whatever.Monthly roll up of profit and loss, eg TurkeyTreatment of inventory as expense or balance sheet, eg Italy.Jurisdictional sales tax, eg USAThe list goes on. There is no standardised accounting approach. Most countries can fit to a template method of accounting as long as they can comply with their local accounting rules. If you operate in a country like Greece they might demand that their local account numbers are used, but the auditors get to give the go-ahead if the global and the local account number is there when the press the enter button.

Easy! I'm just kidding, it isn't easy. However, while you do it - depending on your market - you may feel either giddy about the possibilities or disappointed if it isn't displaying a potential return on investment. Either way, you asked a loaded question and there may not be enough space on Quora's hard drive for the answer; However, I will try.The first thing you need before you begin the financials is a pretty solid indication of your target market. For instance, my company's target market is businesses in Florida with revenues between $5 Million and $20 Million and require software to operate. Without software, the businesses would not be able to function. This part would be your demographic. If you're targeting Business-to-Customer (B2C) like SnapChat, Twitter, etc., then you need to narrow down your demographic based on annual income, behaviors, personality, sex, race, religion, etc. If you're targeting Business-to-Business (B2B) like Amazon Web Services, FreshBooks, etc. then your demographic should be narrowed down based on annual revenue, industry, number of employees, etc. Again, this must be done first before moving forward. Investors need to know that you have seriously thought about your market and revenue potential.Now, let's say you narrowed down to a market size. For example, your app is for females between the ages of 18 - 25 that have internet access and are working professionals in the upper-class San Francisco area. Yes, you want to get that granular if not more. You've come up with a figure of a market size of 200,000. This is where you start to get busy. You plan on attacking the complete market over a span of a year, because you don't have the money at the moment, but you're building this plan to show the investors why you need their money.For the next 12 months, you will market to 16,667 (200,000/12) potential customers a month. If you use various forms of advertising and marketing, you would need to create a "sales funnel" assumption as to how many customers reach the purchasing point of your "sales funnel". To explain the sales funnel... You market to 10 potential customers (leads), 8 of 10 show interest by going to your website (prospects), 5 of the 8 request information (qualified prospects), 3 of the 5 have a need for your product (committed) and 1 of the 3 purchase your app (transacted). To read more about this process, checkout this MaRS post on sales funnel, Stages of the sales funnel | Entrepreneur's Toolkit | MaRS.Now, for each of the methods you use to market, there will be a "cost of customer acquisition." This is what it costs to acquire one customer. You need this number in order to determine your actual cost to get a customer to buy. In traditional businesses, you build a widget and for every widget there is a cost to build. However, in apps, the development of the app is part of your fixed costs or costs you incur from operations rather than on a per sale basis. Your true cost is in acquiring the users.So let's say that out of the 16,667 customers, you perform your funnel and statistically you can acquire only 1% or 166.67. If your monthly fee for the app is $20, that's a monthly estimated revenue (at least in your first month) of $3,333 per month. Usually, the acquisition percentage increases incrementally as your company becomes more well known. Next, you add up all of your "Costs of Customer Acquisition" amounts for all of your advertising methods. Let's say according to your calculations, it costs you $10 to acquire one customer. Multiply that with the 166.67 customers and you get an estimated $1667 in direct cost (cost to acquire a customer directly or Cost of Goods Sold). Subtract the cost from the revenue and you'll get an estimated Net Revenue of $1666 for your first month.The next step is to determine all of your fixed costs (costs that are necessary to operate day to day) for the month. These costs can include salaries, rent, utilities, etc. Add all of these up to come up with your fixed expenses that will be deducted from the Net Revenue. For example, you have rent at $1000 per month, utilities at $200 per month, salaries at $3000 per month, and other expenses at $200 per month. Add those up to approximately $4400 per month. Subtract that from your Net Revenue and you get -$2734 in Net Income (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes and Amortization). Don't worry about the terminology at the moment. As a startup, Interest and Amortization will not be something you'll have to deal with at first. However, you'll only have to deal with taxes if your Net Income is positive, but on your first month you should be in the negative. A key thing to realize and accept is that being in the negative on your first month is a reality. Investors question financial projections that show positive income on the first month. If that was the case, you wouldn't be looking for funding.Okay, so that was a look at one month. This is roughly what you should be looking at for the first month:Revenue $3333Cost of Goods Sold $1667Net Revenue $1666ExpensesRent $1000Utilities $ 200Salaries $3000Other $ 200Total Expenses $4400Net Income -($2734)You can download these template worksheets to guide you, Financial Projections Template.What I just showed you above is considered your income statement. However, how would you calculate your growth. The reality is it is all relative. What you can do is research another company that has built an app using a similar model. Research their growth trajectory and use that percentage as your month to month growth. Another method is to find out what the annual growth is in your industry and use that percentage as a track for your growth. Just be careful you convert the annual growth percentage to months so your growth numbers can be closer to accurate. Even if it is conservative, investors like to know that you're not throwing pie-in-the-sky numbers.Lastly, you would need to create a cash flow statement and a balance sheet as well. However, those projections are more complex and use a multitude of other assumptions like how much you've invested, how much equity you have, etc. If you use the Financial Projections Template above, you can surmise the balance sheet and cashflow statement. Remember, you will need to spread the monthly growth over those as well.In conclusion, when you complete all of your projections, you'll notice that at some point, your income statement will reach the "break-even" point where your Net Income is zero. This is your profit threshold, and if you've done your cashflow correctly, you should have a negative cashflow at that point in time (month). It's practical that when you're asking for investment dollars, you should at least ask for enough money to wash out the negative cashflow at that point in time. This provides you the opportunity to make it to profitability without running out of money.

This is exactly like the setup I used in the early 1980’s in the aerospace industry:The machine that has the track running horizontally and vertically is a Vemco Drafting Machine. We could draw lines anywhere on the board and make them parallel or at an angle of our choosing.The head of the Vemco machine is rotatable and graduated, but most of the time, we used triangles to draw angles at 30, 45, 60, and 90 degrees. I preferred not to have the vertical scale (aka ruler) and only used a horizontal one since my vertical lines were done with a triangle. This is because the vertical scale would get out of calibration (loose screws) very easily and you couldn’t trust it.We would mount a vellum sheet on the green surface you see here. We used masking tape in the corners to secure the paper to the table surface. The green surface is actually a silicone rubber sheet that has just the right amount of give for our pencils to make crisp, clean lines. A hard, smooth surface is not good to draw on. In the old days, people would draw on soft wood boards that would have to be sanded down every now and then because they’d be grooved, so these resilient sheets were state of the art at the time.The vellums were typically ANSI B, C, D, E, or F size sheets. Sometimes, we’d have roll-size H or J vellum and we’d have to roll each end up so we could work on a section of the roll at a time.Circles were drawn with templates preferably if we had the right size, otherwise we’d use a compass, which really took a lot of practice to master.I’d always practice my important circles/arcs on scratch paper before darkening in. It could ruin your whole drawing if you didn’t get it right.For all other lines, drafters would use a “lead holder”, which was sort of like a mechanical pencil, but it just held a thick graphite rod. We needed to put a point on that to make our lines the right thickness. These are still common today because they make great sketching pencils.When we drew our lines with one of these, we actually rotated the pencil as we drew so the lead would wear evenly as the line was being laid down. It took me a while to get used to that and still draw a straight line.There was an art to putting that point on and we were taught to use sandpaper to do that, but later I learned the pros would use a lead pointer attached to the end of their Bruning electric eraser. I splurged and bought a new one for $100 at the time.Yes, we did lots of erasing so we had to have one of these. We didn’t have a MOVE command back then, but we did have an ERASE command!To do precision erasing, you needed a shield like this:Back to drawing lines and selecting leads. Selection of the right lead for the job depended on the task. If you were doing construction lines and “lightening in” object boundaries and guidelines, you would use a 6H lead. You wanted to lighten in your complete drawing and dimensions because if your design changed or you screwed up something, you might have to erase a lot and re-draw; 6H lines disappear easily and completely if they aren’t “darkened in”. Measure twice and darken in once.To draw centerlines, you’d use a 4H lead, pretty sharp. I like my center lines very thin while also being super dark. Hidden lines would usually be a 2H, and object lines would be H. Lettering could be an H, but a lot of guys liked to use F or HB, as it was less fatiguing and didn’t require so much force. But those leads broke easier and the graphite smeared easier, so I usually used H.On rare occasions, we did inking on mylar, but that was only for special circumstances. I still have my Staedtler Mars ink pens that cost me a small fortune back then. We also did what are called “wash-off” mylars, where a vellum drawing is reproduced and printed on mylar with black lines that can easily be erased. We used special pencil leads made for drawing on mylar and special erasers that could erase without taking the matte finish off.Think of wash-offs like opening a drawing and doing a Save As, then making a few edits to the drawing and title block, and then releasing the new drawing in 1/10th the time. Wash-offs were as close to CAD as we got back then.We were taught to use drafting dusters, which put little tiny eraser balls on the drawing. The dusters looked like a sewed up sock and they were good for cleaning the smudges off the drawing.The little balls helped our tools glide across the surface without smearing. But I learned that the real pros used these very little. The truth is that if you used too much, it would actually slightly erase all of your lines so you’d have to go back over them so they’d reproduce better in the blue line or black line machines (copiers). If you lettered with nothing softer than H, you wouldn’t have a problem with smudges either.We always kept one of these handy too:In the 80’s, the Pentel pencil was becoming very popular and it improved drafting quality because you would pick a lead that was already the thickness you wanted for your lines and you didn’t have to make a point just right each time. We would use 0.3 mm for center lines, 0.5 mm for hidden lines, and 0.7 mm for object lines and lettering. We would still use our lead pointers with 6H lead for doing guidelines and layout work though.Lettering was usually done by hand but on some projects, the client (U.S. Military) insisted on stenciled lettering so we did a lot of that. It slowed us down a little but honestly, once you get used to it, you can letter pretty quickly with a good stencil and a Pentel pencil.So that’s how we did the drafting. I will say that back then, we had to use our minds to visualize designs and the exercise of doing that forced us to be more focused on the concepts. There might be one layout of the design and it would be a primary elevation or section view of the assembly. You had to know what you were looking at to project the geometry in the other directions in your mind and then go to the drafting table and draw those parts in 3 or more orthographic views.Scaling was a pain. You were blessed if you could draw at 1:1. So many errors were made back then because someone was drawing at 4:1 or something and they forgot to multiply or divide by 4 or whatever.This was also an issue in the early days of AutoCAD because there was no Paper Space back then. You had to decide what takes precedence, the model or the paper. At first, we chose the paper because we were paper drafters after all, but later we realized it is easier to scale the borders and annotations but leave the model at 1:1 and plot the drawing at the paper scale. But oh, were you in trouble if you had mixed scales on one drawing!The biggest drawback to hand drawing was not that we didn’t have beautiful, rendered 3D views of our models. Everyone had a picture of the model in their heads already so that wasn’t a problem. The drawback was when we needed to make a simple change it was a monumental effort or a big risk. You went back to the layout and salvaged what you could, you did calculations by hand and marked up all of the affected drawings and sent them back to drafting to incorporate redlines. You wouldn’t truly know if you did all this right until the parts were made. Because of this risk, a lot of designs were simply left alone if they would work like they were, knowing they could have been done better if we took the time to make the change and do it right. Better was often the enemy of good enough. CAD changed that for sure.In 1985, I started doing AutoCAD on an IBM-PC XT computer. It was very unnatural for me and many of my colleagues at first. I wasn’t drawing on the board for long (4 years) so I converted pretty easily but some of the old timers back then never could get used to CAD and were happy to finish out their careers and head on into retirement without ever learning it.We had a 640x200 (CGA) color screen but I’d rather work on a Hercules Graphics Monochrome display with 720x348. It was tough to do complex layouts this way but I eventually managed.A lot of people couldn’t get used to doing layouts in AutoCAD and did their design by hand, only using AutoCAD as a drafting tool once the design concept was laid out. But all that changed when we got a 14″ color monitor with 800x600 (SVGA) resolution, as we could appreciate layers better.By 1988, we had display list processors, 19″ CRT displays, and 1024x768 resolution so we were loving it. I never did a drawing by hand again, including layout work, unless I had to dig a vellum out for a direct vellum change on an old drawing. I’ve worked with just about every release of AutoCAD since then.That was a trip down memory lane for me. Sorry for the length. I hope this gives a little feel for how things were in that era for the curious and nostalgic.