How fast can it be done?
Faster than I thought!
Bit of a smile on my face for having just completed my fastest ever forecast - a little over two hours from scratch!
It started with a telephone enquiry from a google search for ‘financial forecasting’. A lovely woman called Jayne who was starting a mixed therapy studio in Halifax, she was applying for a £500 grant from her local authority and had suddenly found out, two days before her meeting, that they wanted a proper financial forecast. She had no idea how to go about it and initially of course it seemed that even my minimum fee - eminently reasonable though she realised it was (!) was going to eat up a significant part of that money, so what was the point?
I couldn’t really see how she was going to resolve this any other way in the time, so the challenge was to see whether I could do something that was at the same time complete and presentable in accounting terms, but was quick enough to allow me to do it for next to nothing. Of course, first she’s a start-up and that always makes life easier, and the business model was really very simple, with no complexities around funding, or equity or things like stock so I got my head down. She got a full edge forecast – the like of which I doubt they’d ever seen in an office dealing with £500 grants - less than 24 hours after her first call. I won’t say it worked out at a great hourly rate, but it was very satisfying to see just how quickly a complete and coherent set of numbers could be done for a start-up.
Her meeting was today so watch this space to see if she got her money.
