Categories with different time ranges

How do I?
1

Overall Goal:

  • To build a financial model for a startup

Challenge:

  • I want to budget for Operating Expenses (OPEX) for different stages of funding eg. Friends and Family, Pre-Seed, Seed etc…

What I tried:

  1. Created a category for Venture funding with amounts and dates of the funding.

  2. Applied the Venture funding category to operating expenses eg. Marketing spend

  3. Allocated an amount to Marketing Spend for each stage of venture funding eg. Pre-Seed = £200, Seed = £500

  4. Applied the category to each of the line items in the OPEX calculation.

What I Got:

  1. Because there wasn’t an end date on each stage of the venture funding it applied the amount allocated to marketing in perpetuity.

  2. However I wanted to step up the amount for each funding round instead of adding together the amounts allocated to the pre-seed, seed stage etc

The Work Arounds:

  1. Manually inputting the amounts allocated to each month, however, if the the date of the funding changes I’d have to manually change the inputs.

  2. Instead of allocating total amounts spent I could just allocate an incremental spend at each funding round (assuming it’s always an increase)

  3. I could add another variable called end date for each round which could be used in the function to set a date when the amount allocated to the financing round should no longer be applied.

Any thoughts??

Output:

Screenshot 2023-02-11 122006
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2

Hey @olireynoldson ! I would create two input variables “Start Date” and “End Date” and explicitly apply the Venture Funding Stage category to each. (set them as Date format, and input the start/end dates of each round in date(yyyy,mm) format.

You can then create a Funding Round Flag variable, which indicates which funding round you’re in. Something like this.

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Then your Opex lines (e.g. Marketing), should just take your Marketing Expense by Funding Round input variable, and just multiply it by the flag.

Here is the template model if you want to have a play :slight_smile: This method means that you can tweak the dates of each funding round and they’ll automatically flow through to adjust your opex accordingly.