ABOUT
The Product
Our product is a three-year financial forecaster that will teach and guide you through the process of setting up or growing a business, no matter how large or small. This is a valuable tool to help the entrepreneur secure investment, grants and loans.
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When starting a business as a student or non-student entrepreneur wishing to learn the basics of setting up a business, you need to get your financial forecast as credible as possible to ensure success going forward to Investors and Banks. Our Pacioli 3 forecaster covers all the information needed to project sales, costs, product mix, loans and capital expenditure to produce a detailed cash flow, profit & loss and balance sheet. It is supported by guidance notes and videos for learning and understanding, as well as allowing you to calculate the salary you will require.
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Our forecaster is intuitive in that it is designed to teach the user financial understanding as they complete it. This is done by placing the user at the centre of the concept, as Luca Pacioli did with his students. The forecaster is built around ‘feeder’ sheets that the user programmes to populate the central sheet containing the cash flow, profit & loss and balance sheet statements. By this method, the user can see the effect of their inputting and track entries through the 3 statements learning the accounting effect as they progress.
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For the knowledge essential to allow you to present to financiers and investors with confidence, we have added a presentation sheet which summarises the key aspects of your projection and includes a valuation of your business based on the average EBITDA (Earnings before Interest, Tax, Depreciation and Amortisation) multiplier for your type of business. The entrepreneur can use this EBITDA valuation feature to demonstrate to financiers their understanding of this valuation technique and in support of a fair valuation.
We promote a ‘Top-Down Approach’ to financial forecasting which means the entrepreneur will begin engaging with their customers from the moment they have their idea. This can be done with judicious protection of Intellectual Property while still allowing meaningful conversations with prospective customers who can contribute to your product development and give you valuable information on price, design, volumes and need. Our forecaster is designed around this approach.
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This ‘Top-Down Approach’ to building your business ensures you will gather realistic data to create your forecast. It will also help you to understand and communicate your forecasts to financiers.
The Origin Story
Pacioli Biz Forecast Ltd. was founded by Sandy Neish and John Hughes. Their inspiration came through observing a strong demand amongst young entrepreneurs for their own financial forecaster that was simple to use and at the same time, allowing them to develop an understanding of their own business finances.
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Both founders have taught financial understanding for over 20 years to entrepreneurs raising various forms of finance. They have seen many potentially great businesses with superb innovation fail to raise finance because the founder(s) could not impress financiers with their grasp of the numbers. John has spent the past 2 decades working with and teaching entrepreneurs the basics of financial forecasting, using an excel forecaster developed by Sandy and with John feeding in suggestions from entrepreneurs for its improvement. Sandy, in his post banking career, was assisting companies in his native North East of Scotland in a business development role.
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In 2019 John did some freelance consultancy and workshop delivery with student entrepreneurs in a Scottish University and demonstrated their excel forecaster. The response was revealing and demonstrated a need for their forecaster. John and Sandy decided to set up their own business and convert their forecaster into a SaaS product called Pacioli 3 which teaches the user financial understanding as they create their 3-year forecast.
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Luca Pacioli was a late 15th C mathematician and was the first to set down and publish his system of double-entry bookkeeping which underpins financial forecasting. It is the system used in the global commercial world today. With computerisation we have sophisticated the concept but also unlearned its underlying principles, and this has led to a level of financial illiteracy which impacts on the understanding of business finances
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Unlike other forecasting tools, our forecaster aims to teach the entrepreneur the fundamentals that go behind the numbers provided by the tool. The entrepreneur will be able to understand their own business finances, and this is one of the most powerful tools that an entrepreneur can have. When pitching for investment, investors will test you on your numbers and if you are not able to match their analytical joust, you will be marked down when it comes to their evaluation of your company. They will especially want to know how you arrived at your company’s valuation, and the Pacioli 3 gives you a tool to calculate your valuation and demonstrate it to the investors. with confidence
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We will provide you with the service and the tools to give you an understanding of your own business finances and the confidence to present them.
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- John Hughes & Sandy Neish, Founders
Who was Luca Pacioli?
Pacioli was a Renaissance Man: - educated for a life in commerce, but also a conjuror, a chess master, a lover of puzzles, a Franciscan Friar, and a professor of mathematics. Today he is celebrated as the most famous accountant who ever lived.
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Luca Pacioli was a late 15th C mathematician and friend and teacher to Leonardo Da Vinci. In 1494 Pacioli summarised and explained the mathematical thinking of the day in his best seller, Summa Mathematica, printed and published on the Guttenberg press, invented 50 years earlier. Within his book Pacioli developed his 27-page treatise on double-entry bookkeeping which became a best seller of the time and was taken up by the Venetian Merchants whose commercial fortunes flourished as a result.
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Pacioli was also an excellent teacher, placing his students at the centre of his lessons, and he taught,, amongst many, the children of the Venetian Merchants. It was no surprise therefore when those merchants adopted his accounting system.
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Pacioli is rightly known as the Father of modern accounting and his system is the one we use today in large and small companies. It has perfectly leant itself to computerisation with its Journal and Ledger system of matching debits and credits.
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The 18th C potter Josiah Wedgwood was one of the first industrial revolutionists to discover and embrace the benefits of Pacioli’s double-entry bookkeeping and it transformed his struggling business in the middle of a recession. With Pacioli’s system he was able to identify where his costs and margins were in a large and complex multi-product business. By applying this accounting system, he was able to see how much each piece of work was costing his business and with this knowledge, to make the correct decisions to clear excess stock and transform his enterprise.
Why Pacioli?
Pacioli was the first to set down and publish his system of double-entry bookkeeping which underpins financial forecasting. It is the system used in the global commercial world today. With computerisation we have unlearned the concept, and this has lead to a need to promote and increase financial literacy which impacts on the understanding of business finances