LivePlan Has a New Look — Even Better Planning and Management
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For the last 10 years, LivePlan has provided streamlined planning and management for small business owners. Along the way, we’ve made upgrades to LivePlan’s design and features to help business owners more effectively grow their businesses. Today marks another step in making LivePlan’s suite of planning and management tools more intuitive with a full user interface update designed to elevate your ability to manage your plan and financials.
This is business management reimagined.
New navigation
For some business owners, the LivePlan Pitch simply isn’t the place to start. Instead, diving right into your Forecast tab or setting milestones in your Schedule is a better use of your time. With that in mind, we found that the original top navigation was too forceful in how it encouraged a specific order of operations for managing your business.
This updated Left-rail navigation is designed to open up the way that you manage your plan within LivePlan. It takes up less space, makes switching between tabs much easier, and even features a collapsable format to help you further remove distractions from your LivePlan instance.
It’s a more elegant navigation solution. One that not only makes LivePlan easier to work with but sets the stage for it to become an even more sophisticated product moving forward.
Clear accounting connection
One piece of feedback we regularly received was that users weren’t aware that they could connect LivePlan to QuickBooks or Xero. Being able to bring in up-to-date financial information not only saves time but makes for more effective financial forecasting. The fact that many users were missing out on this ability didn’t sit well with us and we set out to make that accounting-connected feature more intuitive.
The new UI update brings the QuickBooks and Xero connection front and center. It will always be at the top of your screen, no matter where you are currently working in LivePlan. You no longer have to go hunting around for the option to connect. It also showcases how your accounting data can be used outside of the reporting Dashboard when comparing industry Benchmarks and to enhance your Forecasts with LiveForecast.
Explore unique scenarios
Exploring forecasting scenarios is a vital part of better business management. It helps you explore and understand the health of your business based on different decisions you may make and their impact on your financial results so that you’re prepared for whatever comes your way.
In LivePlan, this Forecast Scenario feature has always allowed you to adapt your financial forecast to explore potential results without disrupting your original forecast. You can run multiple forecast scenarios while still retaining your previous work in your original forecast. Similar to connecting to QuickBooks and Xero, this is an incredibly valuable feature that was previously difficult to find.
To make it more accessible, the Scenario dropdown menu has been renamed and simplified. It now makes Forecast Scenarios more prominent and encourages you to consider potential changes to your strategy and business operations, whether it’s hiring a new employee, opening a new location, or finding a way to cut your expenditures.
LiveForecast additions
We introduced LiveForecast™, a one-click button that displays actual results for completed periods right into your forecasted Profit and Loss statement, earlier this year. We’ve been incredibly excited about the feedback from LivePlan users and how they’re leveraging this new feature to upgrade their forecasts.
From the start, LiveForecast was designed to evolve over time. LivePlan’s new UI introduces the first of these updates with increased screen space for reviewing and updating your Forecast. You can now see more past data and forecasted values at the same time in LiveForecast without having to scroll. This is just the first step in making your Forecast more useful and easier to review.
We truly believe in how powerful financial forecasting can be for small business success and you can expect more updates to LiveForecast and other LivePlan forecasting tools in the near future.
Room to grow
The LivePlan team continues to explore new opportunities to engage with our community and customers. This new visual overhaul and accompanying features have all been driven by your feedback and support. As you begin exploring your updated version of LivePlan, you may notice some blank space at the bottom of the app.
We see the need to better engage within the app itself and are looking for opportunities to bring more direct messages, instructions, and announcements right to you. This unused real estate will become our direct line of communication with you and other LivePlan users moving forward. Webinar announcements, direct access to help center articles, recommendations, and exclusive offers are just a few of the things you’ll start seeing in the coming months.
Of course, we still want your feedback to make the most of this new communication space. Let us know what you’d like to see and if there are any specific resources that will help you and your business grow.
Let us know what you think of LivePlan’s new look
LivePlan’s new look sets the stage for the future of better business management. We know that you want to find better ways to strategically manage and grow your business, and our team is dedicated to making continued improvements that help you do just that. This UI refresh not only streamlines and highlights the most useful features in LivePlan but makes it easier for us to bring you new and exciting updates moving forward.
For current LivePlan users, please reach out to our team of customer advocates and let us know about your experience and if you have any feedback. We look forward to continue improving the forecasting and planning experience for you and your business.
