The creation of any long-term financial forecast greater than two years is a time intensive effort, let alone creating a five-year financial projection! To save you valuable time and considerable effort, Ben Murray has created the perfect one for your SaaS business.
After the great popularity of his other SaaS Financial models, and his own hours spent creating long-term financial projections, Ben wanted to create a forecast model that can help SaaS founders and finance professionals and ultimately save them hours and hours' worth of time creating the excel models.
This five-year financial projection is built around Ben's existing models, but differs in the fact that there is one tab solely dedicated to automatically scaling a majority of headcount expenses. It scales headcount based on specific revenue, headcount or expense drivers.
New Tab - Scale Ops
This tab will do the heavy work for you when forecasting new headcount, taxes, wages, benefits, etc. Here, you drive headcount for Services, Support, R&D, Customer Success, Marketing, Sales and G&A.
Bottoms Up Approach to Headcount Forecasting
This spreadsheet builds headcount from the entry-level position and then up the chain. E.g. a technical support analyst is required is required first, then managers are hired according to specified volumes of analyst positions.
Headcount Roster Tab
Indeed, headcount can be manually counted via the Headcount Roster tab. If you are making key hires that won't be captured by the 'Scale' tab, you can enter the individual heads on this tab.
Total Operating Expenses Tab
The wage data from the Headcount Roster and Scale tabs goes into the 'Total OpEx' tab. You will see grey rows in the forecast area of each department. The grey rows should not be modified as they pull in the wage data from the headcount tabs.
Underneath the grey rows, enter your department's forecast as usual. Also, add expenses to each department's expense forecast where necessary.
This tool comes with a complete set of instructions, that you can find in the second to last tab of the spreadsheet.
