Our regularly scheduled monthly product update went live on Thursday evening. In addition to small improvements and routine fixes, this release adds the following capabilities:
Make a copy of your plan
On the My Plans page, there is now a "Copy" link next to each plan. This acts like the save-as function in a word processor, making a complete copy of your plan. You can use this to experiment with different scenarios (what if sales are better or worse than expected?), to save a backup version of your plan as of a certain point in time, or to start a new plan with the same outline adjustments you made in the previous one.
Optional email notifications for comments
Want to know when other users add comments to your plan? Choose User Settings from the Profile menu. You will see a new option to turn on email notifications, one for each new comment.
Financial Statements chapter
In full-financials mode only, the Profit and Loss Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statement sections are now organized into their own chapter (called "Financial Statements"). This makes it easier to navigate to them in the app as well as to find those pages in the printed document or PDF.
No more limit in the forecast
The Sales Forecast table builder originally enforced a hard limit of ten products or services. Staying under that total is still a good general rule. By popular demand, though, we have removed the hard limit, giving you the flexibility to decide how many lines is right for your plan.
Easy navigation in the Appendix chapter
The Appendix chapter now places the detailed view of each table in its own section, rather than putting them all into one section. That makes it easier to navigate between these views on screen. It also significantly improves the speed of the interface for those tables.
A note on the Help Center. One thing missing from this release is an updated Help Center. Sorry about that. We are moving the existing content to a new, better platform and adding lots of content. That work should be ready within the next month. In the meantime, we are here to answer your questions one on one.
As always, let us know what you think of the app and its new features. Just click the Give Feedback button next to the LivePlan logo. Thanks!
On Thursday evening, we published a product update with several notable feature changes:
Edit or delete comments
We hope you've been using the commenting feature to collaborate with other users — or even just to make notes to yourself. Comments are even handier now that we have added the ability to edit or delete them. All users can update their own comments. Account owners can update those of other users if needed.
Longer idle timeout
By popular demand, the timeout for inactivity has been changed from 30 minutes to one hour. You can still log out immediately by clicking the Log Out link in the upper right. But if you are logged in and don't use the app for a while, you will have more time before you get logged out.
Improved email receipt
Also by popular demand, we have expanded the email message that we send after each charge on your account. It now includes the service dates and details that you will need if you want to use the receipt for accounting or tax purposes.
Easier access to Tim's video
We have added links to Tim Berry's popular advice videos in the relevant section and instructions, so they are easier to find.
Detailed depreciation option
This feature addition is relevant only for plans using the "full financials" mode, which you can activate by going to the Level of Detail tab on the Plan Settings page. By default, plans set to full financials apply the Average Depreciation Period setting to figure the depreciation values of all major purchases. The options for that setting extend up to ten years. What if you have a major purchase like a trademark or a commercial building that has a useful life far beyond ten years? Now you can go to the Table Builders tab of the Plan Settings page and select the "Switch to detailed depreciation handling" option. Then when you add or edit major purchases, you will see an option to enter whatever number of years you would like to use as the depreciation period for that purchase.
As always, let us know what you think of the app and its new features. Just click the Give Feedback button next to the LivePlan logo. Thanks!
On Wednesday, we pushed a minor product update. This release improves the balance sheet's handling of accounts payable to reflect the true liability associated with direct-cost purchases on credit in all scenarios. Only plans set to "full financials" mode in the plan settings are affected by this change, since the balance sheet is not part of basic financials.
Our next major product update is planned for early January. Let us know if you have any questions or feedback.
On Thursday evening, we published a minor product update focused on database and infrastructure improvements. This release should significantly improve the service's speed and responsiveness. Several minor reported bugs were fixed in this update as well.
We pushed a minor update on Tuesday evening to resolve several recently reported bugs, including a fix to the A4 paper setting in the PDF output, correcting a problem with the basic to full financials switch in the Financial Plan chapter, and making sure that users invited during the owner's first-ever session actually received their invitations. We also made several performance improvements to make the app a little snappier.
As always, we would love to hear your feedback: help@liveplan.com.
On Sunday night, we pushed a minor update to fix a bug reported by a couple of customers this weekend. The bug affected only plans with varying unit prices in the sales forecast where some of the monthly values were left at zero. In such cases, the values were being saved properly, but the annual total was displaying as zero in some views. This is now resolved.
We went live with a major product update on Thursday evening. This is the culmination of several months of work from our team, and we are eager to hear what you think of the new functionality. Here is a quick look at what's new:
Introducing the "full financials" option
As you know, LivePlan is designed to provide a basic set of financials. You enter your sales forecast, personnel plan, and budget details, and the app produces a proper P&L statement. Simple and sensible — that has been a key goal for this project. With the new release, new plans still start in this same "basic financials" mode. If you want to add more detail to your financial plan, though, you now have the option to switch your plan into "full financials" mode, which adds much of the new functionality described below.
How to access the new financial features
Your existing plans will remain in basic-financials mode. The same is true of all new plans that you create. We always start with basic financials. To switch your plan to full financials:
Open your plan
Click the Plan Settings link (on the right side of the black title bar)
Click the Level of Detail tab
Under Financial Mode, click Full
Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page
Balance sheet and cash flow statement
In full-financials mode, your plan will include a projected balance sheet and a projected cash flow statement. These are the other two (along with the P&L) of the three standard financial statements. The balance sheet allows you to better manage major purchases ("assets"), which now include automated depreciation to reflect their long-lasting value. The cash flow statement enables you to see your cash position over time. This is particularly important with startups, where the time lag between sales and payments on credit often creates a need for short-term financing or other resources.
Cash flow assumptions
In full-financials mode, you can adjust your cash flow projections with a series of controls: adjust what percentage of your sales and purchases are on credit, set the average payment delay for accounts receivable and payable, and choose whether to turn on automated inventory handling based on your forecasted sales.
Loans and investments
In full-financials mode, the optional Loans and Investments section makes it easy to add funding sources. Automated calculations are provided for loans, lines of credit, and credit cards. Just enter what you know, and the app will take care of the rest. You can also enter more general financing if you are not sure yet what form it will take.
Support for sales taxes in forecast
In full-financials mode, it makes sense to include any sales taxes (or GST, VAT, etc.) that you collect from your customers and later pay out to the government, since keeping that cash on hand temporarily can have a notable effect on your cash flow. In basic-financials mode, we typically recommend excluding such taxes from your forecast, since the money you collect is not yours to keep. With full financials, though, you have a new option in the sales forecast to collect taxes at a set rate for individual products or services.
Five-year plans and additional years of monthlies
Tim Berry, our founder and resident planning expert, recommends the standard three-year plan with one year of monthly detail as the starting point for your business plan. Predicting the future beyond three years or at a monthly detail in future years is difficult and often unwarranted. That said, you may have good reasons to want to extend the timeline, particularly if you are working with a lender who requests five years of projections. In LivePlan, a new option in the plan settings now lets you increase the plan length to five years, with as many of those years in monthly detail as you like.
Appendix tables
All plans now include an Appendix chapter with the full monthly detail of all of the financial charts. Previously this detail was available for you to view in the app, but readers of your plan document could see only the annual view of the tables in the body of the plan. Since these tables are wider than the rest of the plan, the appendix pages print in landscape orientation, which is common with business plan documents.
Internal comments
Want to discuss your work in progress with your partners or collaborators? Or just write notes to yourself about what you want to say in each part of the plan? Check out the new commenting feature. Each item in your plan now includes its own Facebook-style comments area. Add comments for your other users to see, without exposing them to readers of your final document. This feature also makes the free guest pass more valuable as a way for your contacts to review and comment on your plan without making changes.
Plan-specific access rights
You can now choose which plans are accessible to each of the users on your account. When working on a plan, you can also control which users have access to it. This makes it much easier to work on plans for multiple companies or teams without worrying about anyone seeing or changing the plans of others.
New look and feel for table builders
Our user experience designer has reworked the table builders for entering financial information to be more attractive and functional.
Let us know what you think!
Your feedback is a major part of our own planning process. Let us know what you think of the new features in whatever way is easiest for you:
Click the Give Feedback button at the top of the app to send us a quick note
Call us at 888-498-6138 or +1 541 683 6162. Our customer care team is available from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific Time, Monday through Friday.
Use the live chat on our website at www.liveplan.com during office hours
On Monday evening, we published two quick updates to the app. The first release closed an obscure but concerning security weakness that was discovered by one of the outside specialty firms that we have contracted with to do penetration testing. These guys are experts in the black arts of hacking websites and services, and they do a great job of helping us be certain that our app is fully secure and hardened against even really creative attacks like this one. We treat reported issues from penetration testing very seriously, in this case deploying a fix less than 24 hours after its discovery.
The second release tonight improved the login page's handling of older browsers. The app is designed to display a notification to users of Internet Explorer 6 and other outdated browser versions that have trouble running modern web apps. The logic in that functionality was imperfect, though, and the notification was displaying to users with Firefox 7 and other brand-new browser releases. We have reimplemented the warning to display to selected old browsers only.
On Sunday evening, we released a minor product update. In addition to routine bug fixes and a couple of performance improvements, here's what this release delivers:
Better page breaking in PDFs
The app's new and improved "print to PDF" feature provides better breaking of tables across pages to minimize wasted space in your document. It also avoids "widowed" headings — that is, headings that appear at the bottom of a page, separated from their related content on the following page. Such headings will now appear on the following page to stay associated with their content.
Painless product updates
Alongside this update, we also performed a database upgrade, one that will enable us to release future updates to the app without disrupting active users.
Last Sunday night, we released a notable product update. Much of our focus this round was on performance improvements and bug fixes. Beyond the product quality work, though, we also introduced several notable new features:
Free resources
The new Resources tab in your plan view provides access to an exclusive mini-site of free resources on startups, planning, and small business. Some of these are publicly available resources that you may just not know about. Others are special content from organizations that have partnerships with our company and have agreed to give you access at no charge. We have just scratched the surface on what's possible here. Give it a look, and if you think of other areas where you would like help finding good resources, let us know.
High-quality Word export
The Print page now offers an option to export a high-fidelity version of your plan document to Microsoft Word. That gives you more flexibility in customizing the presentation of your final document. The export uses the current .docx file format, which is supported natively by Word 2003 and above. If you have an older version of Word, you can open .docx files by installing a converter add-on.
Those are the notable new features in this release. If you have other ideas or requests that you'd like to share, drop an email to help@liveplan.com, or use the Give Feedback button next to the LivePlan logo in the app. Thanks!