The wizard, step by step
Overview
Project Overview and Cost Categories, the two steps every project starts with.
Project Overview
The basics of the business. Later steps build on them.
- Currency. Every amount in the project is in this currency.
- Product name, capacity and main applications. What you make or sell, how much of it you can produce or serve (for example "60 seats" or "50,000 units a year"), and who it's for.
- Employment. How many people will work there. Keep it equal to the total headcount on Human Resources. Lenders notice when the two disagree.
- Floor areas. Land and building areas, used by the land and building cost tables.
- Energy and water use. For production sites: electricity (kW), water (litres per hour) and gas (m³ per hour). Foundation multiplies these by the tariffs and operating hours on Financial Assumptions to get your yearly energy cost, so you don't enter it anywhere else.
- Technical specifications. Free-form label and value pairs for anything else a reader should know.
Cost Categories
Foundation has a library of about thirty cost categories, from land and machinery to cloud hosting and payment processing. Your business type switched on a sensible starting set. Here you adjust it to your business:
- Switch off what doesn't apply. A remote software company has no rent; a shop that leases its premises has no land or building.
- Switch on what's missing. A software product that takes card payments needs payment processing; a service firm with vans needs vehicles.
Switching a category off doesn't delete its data. It's kept and simply left out of the totals, so you can switch it back on later.
Three categories are always on: Pre-Operational Expenses, Human Resources and Products & Revenue.