Product Update: Pay with Paypal, New Dashboard Metrics, and Easier Data Sorting

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While you’ve been busy working to grow your business, the development team here at LivePlan has been busy adding new features and making the product even better.

Here’s a quick rundown of our latest enhancements. As always, if you don’t see what you’ve been waiting for, please let us know in the comments.

You can now pay with PayPal

Many of you have asked if you can pay for LivePlan with PayPal, and now you can. So, if you want to subscribe to LivePlan and pay with a pre-paid card, a direct debit from your bank account, or even BitCoin, you can.

This isn’t just for new subscribers. Any subscriber can now change their payment method to PayPal from the “Manage Account” area in LivePlan.

1 - you can now pay with paypal

We’ve add new metrics to the Dashboard

If you’re tracking your progress on the LivePlan Dashboard, we thought you might find a few additional metrics pretty useful. So, we’ve added new metrics for cash burn rate, asset breakdown, debt, inventory, and payroll breakdown.

New metric for cash burn rate

If you’re building a startup, keeping a close eye on the rate at which your company is using up its cash is critical. The cash can’t run out before the business gets traction.

To track this, we’ve added a new Cash Burn Rate metric to the Dashboard:

2 - save metric for cash burn rate

The cash burn rate metric calculates the difference between the selected period’s ending and starting balances of the Cash line on the balance sheet—determining how much cash has been lost (or gained)—and then divides that amount by the number of months in the selected period.

New metric for asset breakdown

If you track your assets by category to make sure you are staying in sync with the expectations in your forecast, you’ll find the new Asset Breakdown metric useful.

3 - new metric for asset breakdown

The overall value for this metric shows the Total Assets line of the balance sheet for the selected period. The segments listed in the asset breakdown are as follows:

  • Cash on hand shows the matching line from the balance sheet.
  • Accounts Receivable shows the matching line from the balance sheet.
  • Inventory shows the matching line from the balance sheet, but only if inventory is turned on in cash flow assumptions.
  • Other Current Assets shows the matching line from the balance sheet (but only if that line is enabled in Gear tab > Forecast > Special features).
  • Long-Term Assets (After Depreciation) shows the combined total of the Long-Term Assets and Accumulated Depreciation lines from the balance sheet.

New metric for debt

Tracking your outstanding debt so you know how much you still owe, and making sure you’re paying it down as planned is important for any new company.

So, we built a new Debt metric.

The value for this metric is the sum of the ending balances of the Short-Term Debt and Long-Term Debt lines of the balance sheet for the selected period.

4 - new metric for debt

New metric for inventory

If you sell physical goods, keeping track of your inventory trends is important. You want to make sure that you don’t tie up too much of your cash (or working capital) in what are essentially future sales. ​

So, a new Inventory metric is available in the trend view, but only for companies who have inventory handling enabled. This metric shows the ending balance of the Inventory line on the balance sheet for the selected period.

5 - new metric for inventory

New metric for payroll breakdown

While you could track payroll in the Expense Breakdown widget on the Dashboard (Salaries & Wages and Employee-Related Expenses), there was no easy way to see how much you are paying in salaries and benefits. Time for a new metric.

A new Payroll breakdown metric now shows you what your total costs are for your employees as well as a breakdown of salaries compared to benefits, payroll taxes, etc.

6 - new metric for payment breakdown

Sorting your data is now also easier

The sorting feature in the Dashboard tables is fantastic, but we didn’t make it obvious enough. Now, every column in the tables shows a sort icon.

The sorted column, if there is one, shows a single up or down arrow icon, depending on the direction of the sort. On hover, the icon for the selected column turns blue.

7 - sorting data is easier

We fixed the confusion around “target” in progress charts

Some of you were confused by our use of the term “target” in the Dashboard. We’ve fixed that, so what was previously labeled as “target” is now labeled “Forecast:” or “Prev period:” or “Prev. year” as shown here:

8 - fixed confusion around target

On the trend progress view, the “Target:” no longer appears under each gauge. Instead, that text shows the actual result:

9 - target no longer appears under gauge

As always, we love to hear from you. Let us know what you think in the comments, give us a call at 888-498-6138, or email us.

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Noah Parsons
Noah Parsons
Noah is currently the COO at Palo Alto Software, makers of the online business plan app LivePlan.
Posted in LivePlan Updates

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