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You have received this Profit Plan Newsletter as a licensed
user of Profit Plan® -- Your Vision of Tomorrow®.
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PROFIT PLAN PLANNING TIPS - January, 2002
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January Contents:
Profit Plan Training Classes - Feedback
Enhancements for
Tired Eyes
Clearing Historical Blues
Zoom In on Assumptions.
Profit Plan v2001's Smart
Mouse Pointers
The Pointing Hand
Can I Edit This Cell?
QuickBooks 2002 Export - New Name for Old Option
Are My Sales Really Unpredictable?
Using Non-financial Account Types - Intro
Extracting Sample Files
The Edit Bar
A Special Case - Using the None Account Type
Ordering the Profit Plan v2001 Update
Topics in the February
Issue
Handling Real-world Constraints
Finding REAL
Break-Even by Interation
Base-line and Project Planning Concepts
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Profit Plan Training Classes
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Like all of you, part of our planning process involves validating product
concepts. In last
month's Newsletter we asked for feedback from those of you really serious
about wanting
to learn how to apply Profit Plan to your real-world planning issues via
hands-on two-day
training seminars. We need more feedback so we are extending this
request again this
month.
If you are seriously interested in computer lab based hands-on training,
please access the
training page on our web site to let us know. Your responses
will help us determine if,
when, and what training classes are offered!
No, your responses do not obligate you. But we truly need more
feedback before taking
this show on the road. For those suggesting late February/early March
time periods, we
regret to say that the schedule has proved unfeasible. Our next window
will be in late
May/June instead.
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Enhancements for Tired Eyes
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While color-coding the Profit Plan time horizons
makes it very easy to tell where
history ends and the future begins, the blue "fill
pattern" can make the historical data more
difficult to read. Here is an easy way to
get the blue out of all your reports.
(1) Select Annual Assumptions Sheet.
(2) Place the cursor on first (top) blue
row, left-most blue column on the sheet.
(3) Click the Colors & Patterns button
on the Formatting toolbar.
(4) Click the "None" button in
the "Fill Pattern" frame.
(5) Click OK, The selected cell
will now appear as white.
(6) Select Options / Reset Assumptions from
main menu.
(7) Double-click "Refresh account Names
and Layout". (See Caution below.)
Caution:
Refreshing a form or report restores default underlines. So If you
have
spent time adding your own underlines, a safer technique for getting the
blue
out is to highlight the entire area you wish to clear and then use the
Colors &
Patterns button to remove the Pattern.
The historical color for most reports and forms
is taken from the top-most left-hand cell
of the Annual Assumption Sheet whenever
the report are refreshed. This occurs each
time the report or form is viewed, if Profit
Plan has noted any changes through the
model that might warrant this. But
simple color changes are not considered significant
by themselves. So you might need to
manually refresh a report the color change.
To manually refresh a report or form
in Profit Plan v2001, the Options / Refresh Display
menu item has been made available.
For most earlier editions, try double-clicking the
main tab at the bottom of Profit Plan
containing the report instead. Of course, for the
Assumptions Sheets themselves, the
Options / Reset Assumptions selection can be
used to accomplish cosmetic and/or
default formula restructuring
Zoom in on Assumptions (or anything else.)
If it's late at night and your eyes are loosing
focus, try Profit Plan's View / Zoom (display)
menu option. Spin up the magnification in
5% increments and see if this helps. If so,
simply click OK to keep the setting.
The Zoom setting affects only the form or report
currently viewed. These settings are also
saved between sessions if you save the model itself.
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Profit Plan v2001's Smart Mouse Pointer
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To provide visual feedback about cell protection, Profit Plan v2001 reshapes
the mouse
pointer to provide visual clues so you know if a cell can be entered, clicked,
and/or moved.
The Pointing
Hand -- Many of Profit Plans forms are interactive.
The details behind ratios,
computations, or even input requirements can often by obtained by clicking
on green
underlined names. When over one of these "hot spots", the
cursor will become a pointing
hand. Simply left-click with the pointing hand to alternately expose
or hide the underlying data!
Plus (large) - If a data cell will accept additional (or
new) data, the mouse pointer will
appear as a fat "plus" sign.
Arrow
-- If a cell contains no hidden data and is "locked", the mouse
pointer is an arrow
everywhere within the cell. Your can point to it but not change it.
Plus (large)
converting to Arrow -- If the mouse is a plus sign inside a cell
but converts to
an arrow at its edge, the cell contents is MOVABLE. Pressing the
left mouse button when the
Plus changes to an Arrow allows you to move the data to another cell.
Plus (small lower
right corner) If a cell is dragable, the mouse
turns into a small plus sign
when over the lower right corner of the cell. Pressing the left mouse
button allows you to
drag (copy) that cell's contents to the right or down. If the cell
contains a formula, it is
automatically adjusted to match the new cell as it is copied.
Note:
When a form is unprotected, only the Plus pointers appear outside the frozen
row and column title areas.
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QuickBooks 2002 Export - New Name for Old Option
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We are pleased to report that QuickBooks 2002 continues to export its financial
detail
statements much as has been done since QuickBooks 99. However one
cosmetic change
was made in a QuickBooks drop-down "Type of File" list that
might cause minor confusion.
In earlier versions of QuickBooks, you selected their "Excel/Lotus
123" Type of File option
to "Print" a financial statement to disk for use in other applications.
Now the file type has
been renamed "Comma Delimited File", so choose this from the
Print dialog's Type of File
list instead. It is exactly the same choice as before; simply relabeled
to be more generic.
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Are My Sales Really Unpredictable?
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When sales seem unpredictable, it is often helpful to "drill down"
into the underlying
components that feed into those sales. For example, a lumber mill
might have better luck
forecasting lumber sales by beginning to dissect the sale into its components...
What has
been happening to the price per board foot over time. Why?
What can I project about
the price, assuming my production output won't affect overall supply/demand
factors
in my market significantly. And what about demand for lumber in general.
Sure, my prices
relative to others will affect my share of the market, but assuming my
pricing practices
continue unchanged, what can I project about unit demand in the market
for my lumber?
Using Non-financial Account Types top
To answer questions like this, Profit Plan allows the insertion of "non-financial"
accounts
directly into the Chart of Accounts. These accounts can be used to
begin studying the
factors that are driving the "financial" accounts. In the
above scenario, one would really
like to look at Price/Board-Foot of past lumber sales, to isolate price
trends from the overall
total Sales account financial data. And one would like to look at
historical total board-feet
sold in the same time period, to see if price was affecting volume or if
the general condition
of the building industry was of more importance.
To enter such "non-financial" accounts in Profit Plan, simply
enter them directly into
the Account Setup sheet wherever convenient. The process is the same
as for any
"financial" account, except they generally require one of two
special account types.
Use the "non-financial level" account type for something
that represents a specific
balance on-hand on the last day of a fiscal period. These items will
generally appear most
often in the balance sheet. They are generally used for elements
such as the actual number
of "Shares Outstanding" at the end of the fiscal year.
Use the "non-financial rate" account type for items that can
be expressed as # of X per Y.
For example, "Price/Board-Foot" data is a rate expressed as Price
per Board-Foot. As
another example, "Board-Feet Sold" would typically represent
total units sold per year.
Extracting Sample Files - a Quick Detour top
The Alpha Plus Inc sample model shipped with Profit Plan has some simple
examples
of possible uses of "non-financial" accounts for projecting sales
and costs. This model is
one of the samples automatically added on your hard drive during a typical
installation process.
We will examine the model below, as part of our introduction
to non-financial accounts.
To see if you still have it on disk, select File / Open from Profit Plan's
main menu, or select it
from the "Recent Models" list, if still on the File menu.
If you do not find it, you can reinstall
it easily enough with the following instructions.
(1) Insert the Profit Plan v2001 CD into your CD-ROM Drive.
(2) When the Installshield installation program begins, click through
to the
"Type of Setup" screen..
(3) Select "Custom" and chose "Next".
(4) Clear all the check boxes except the "Sample Files"
choice.
(5) Click Next and continue to the Finish button. The samples
are now available.
Using Non-financial Account Types (cont.)
Note: If you have the Alpha Plus
Inc model available, open it from Profit Plan now.
If not, use the instructions above to reinstall Profit Plan's sample files.
We will use it
below and again much more extensively in next month's newsletter .
In Profit Plan, it is often more convenient to review the assumption
formulas found in the
forecast section of the Assumptions Sheet directly in the Edit Bar.
This special window
allows you to see the underlying formula (if any) that is generating the
value that actually
appears directly on the Assumptions Sheet. This is particularly useful
for reviewing
non-financial accounts.
While viewing the Alpha Plus Inc model in Profit Plan, select the main
"Account Setup"
tab. Notice that Sales is broken into several sets of accounts.
For each training center,
one sees a "Gross Sales" account. Below each center's Sales revenue
account appears
a "Revenue/Hour" non-financial rate account and a "Class
Hours" non-financial level
account. We'll discuss why the "Class Hours" was assigned a non-financial
level account
in the next issue. Using the fact that those class hours are really
hours per year or month,
a non-financial rate could have been used instead. But as you will
discover next month,
the choice of non-financial type also relates to how you want the account
to total over
the year.
Now click on the Assumptions tab and select the Annual sheet.
Notice that the model
shows a steady price of $50/class hour. But Class hours are growing
and therefore so
is the sales revenue in each Center. Now let's take a look at where
these numbers
came from and what they mean.
The Edit Bar top
To open the Edit Bar in Profit Plan v2001, click the Edit Bar button on the Standard
toolbar. This button has an icon including a sheet with formulas
and a magnifying glass. (On
older editions of Profit Plan, use the View / Show / Edit Bar menu.)
When the Edit Bar appears
it will be located directly below the other toolbars and appears as an
elongated text box
adjacent to a label displaying the current location of the main sheet cursor.
The Edit Bar can be used to view, edit and modify any formula that appears
in it. This
provides a much quicker way to review formulas than via the Assumption
Designer.
With the Edit Bar open, place the main cursor on the 12/1992 cell opposite
"Seattle
Center". Notice the Edit Bar now displays the same value as
seen under the sheet
cursor (although without commas or other formatting characters).
Because the Edit
Bar is displaying a number, rather than a formula, we know that the value
displayed on
the main sheet for this cell was manually entered there. This is
to be expected for
historical financial detail data.
Next, move the cursor down one row to the Revenue/hour account.
Again the number
in the Edit Bar is the same as on the sheet. In this case, the value
is "non-financial", not
in the sense that it doesn't affect finances, but only in that it is not
a number that appears
directly in the typical financial statement.
Now move down one more row to the Class Hours row. Once again,
the number is the
same in the Edit Bar as on the Assumption Sheet. So it was entered
also, probably
from time sheets accumulated over time.
A Special Case - the Blank non-financial account type top
Any blank line on a form can be used as a temporary "non-financial" account line...
Suppose we wanted to verify that the Class Hours and the Revenue/Hour
data entry
was accurate. Or, put another way, see if the time sheets from which
the Class Hour
data was collected had been recorded accurately back in 1992. To
do so, let's use
a trick and recompute the hours from the sales totals and Revenue/Hour
data.
Since we can compute non-financial values anywhere we wish on the sheet
(assuming
sheet protection is off and we are not in a "frozen titles" area),
let's recompute the hours
that should have appeared in the 1992 time sheet data. We'll put
it right above the
existing data, for convenience, then check the results. If correct,
we will then clear
away this temporary computation to avoid clutter. Let's proceed...
How about the class hours for the rest of the historical years?
To reproduce the formula
built for 1992 across the line for 1993 through 1996 is really easy.
Proceed as follows:
Yes. We now see Alpha Plus knew how to keep accurate time records and did!
Finally, we said earlier that computations built on blank account lines
(i.e., those with no
account type associated with it in the Account Setup sheet) are temporary.
How temporary?
The answer is they will survive until the next time the default formulas
are reestablished on
the sheet. At that point, the data entry (historical and forecast
value) section of the sheet is
reviewed by account type. By design, the data entry section of all
lines with no (blank) account
type are blanked out. Any data entered there will disappear.
So what causes the sheet to refresh (be rebuilt)? Any number of
things... Changing an
account type means Profit Plan needs to rethink all relationships on the
sheet. Inserting or
deleting accounts is also guaranteed to do so. But what if you simply
want to get rid of test
formulas created above right now?
To force a sheet or form to refresh immediately, simply press Ctrl-R.
The formulas will be
reviewed. Any cell that is currently BLANK, or has a formula that
terminates with a "+US"
(meaning we at SDC built it), or is on a line with a BLANK account type,
will be reset to its
default condition. On lines with the blank (NONE) account type, the
entire data section
of the account line is reset to blanks.
More on non-financial accounts next issue! You can close up Alpha Plus Inc for now.
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Ordering the Profit Plan v2001 Upgrade
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If you are not yet using Profit Plan v2001, you owe it to yourself to
consider upgrading before
you begin next year's budget. As always, every edition is more powerful
and robust than
its predecessor, as you can see for yourself by reviewing the upgrade history
available at
our What's New
web page. An order form is available from that page.
A few of you apparently did not receive your Fall direct mail upgrade
offer. If so, please
let us know by e-mail
so we can update your mailing information in the database!
Then you won't miss out on the discounts found on our early upgrade renewal
mailings.
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Topics in the February Issue
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In February, we will continue with our exploration of the uses of "non-financial"
accounts
to see how physical and economic limits might impose constraints on growth.
We will
also show you how to compute true Break-Even across your entire forecast!
If time permits,
we will then introduce Profit Plan's project and base-line planning concepts
to build plans
to solve Break-Even issues. If not, we'll pick it up in March.
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How to Opt-Out
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Copyright 2002 - Security Development Corp.
10406 - 40th Avenue SE
Everett, WA 98208 USA
tel: (425) 483-0850
fax: (425) 483-0683
sdc@sdc-usa.com