Palo Alto Business Plan Pro 2006 Description:

Palo Alto Business Plan Pro 2006 review:
5 stars (Just what I neded) - I was looking for something to make my planning process simpler, and still very professional. I have used Business Plan Pro in the past, and I am very happy with the latest version. The increased help is wonderful and really explains issues related to the concepts behind business planning. I love the new wizards to help me get through the process, and the output is very professional with color charts and graphs. Hooray for the new version!
2 stars (Business Plan Pro 2006 Review) - I have been using BPlan Pro since 2002 when they released the version "BPlan Pro 2002", and HAD been a very satisfied user of the product.

Last week I purchased (upgraded to Business Plan Pro 2006- Premier), and my experience has been pretty bad. As a rather experienced user of the product I found the following problems.



New Users





1.Exporting to MS Word gives pathetic quality for chart-images. You would never want to take anything like this to a potential investor. I contacted Palo Alto Technical help and they were LEAST helpful. The person said "That's a Microsoft problem. We cannot do anything with that". If they don't expect it to show up right in Word, I wonder what program they are expecting it to show up in. (FYI, I must say here that the resolution in Adobe Acrobat was perfect, but unfortunately you CANNOT edit a PDF document unless you have the Acrobat Writer-approx $500)

2.In short, you have to work within the Bplan Pro 2006 itself, and export directly to Adobe PDF format (which gives you very little flexibility to work on the document, outside of Bplan Pro 2006). In contrast, Bplan Pro 2002 gave you the flexibility to export it anytime (any part of the plan) into MS Word and you could edit it without losing any clarity in the charts at all! (Interestingly, I asked Bplan Tech support, why they cannot do something which they easily had in their own product 4 years back!!, and the answer again was.."it has something to do with Microsoft"



Old Users Upgrading



Stick to your older versions, unless you really need Year 2 month-wise breakup for your financials and sales projections.



1.When you export from a previous version to the current version, you need an additional utility (free download from the maker's website) to convert it. In other words it's not backward compatible like a Mircrosoft Word or Excel file. A previous version file WILL NOT open in a newer version of BPlan Pro. This is excusable, BUT the problem lies in the fact that many of the formulae that you had built into building the business plan in the OLD version WILL NOT reflect in the new version (after you convert). Instead, Bplan Pro 2006 merely puts in the "value" without showing the formula on which it was based.



2.The problem with the older versions is that, lets say you are starting your business in Sep 2007. All you can get is a monthly projection for the FIRST year (which is just the first 3 months), whereas most of the action will happen over the next year (2006), and only business plan pro premier version allows you to do a month-wise for second year. (Note:" There is NO option if you want a month-wise for year 3). In my case, the investors wanted split up for first 6 quarters. (which is Q4-2007, Q1-Q4 2006, and Q1-2007, a genuine scenario where one might need monthly/quarterly spilt up for the first 3 years because the first 6 quarters are spread over 3 separate years).



3.Few bugs in the embedded spreadsheet



4.The few plus points that I found:



a.There is a forecaster tool, that lets you "drag" charts and values on the fly, and that's pretty cool, without having to manually enter values (e.g, sales projections, expenses, etc)

b.Look and feel is slightly better.

c.Export into Excel is very much better, and in good format.

d.Again, this is just a week of playing around...so I should have more updates soon.






5 stars (if you fear to do a business plan buy this software!!) - What can i say.....If i knew about this software before it would have solved me many headaches and sleepless nights. This is easy!!! I feel confident to present my plan everybody.