Anything before your plan start date will be a part of your opening balance.

While existing businesses can start their plan easily whenever they want to begin modelling the future, a startup may want to consider two approaches.

For a startup

There are two main plans you want to make as a startup. An operating plan and a ramp up plan.

The operating plan is for checking the feasibility of your business idea. It takes any 12 month period and looks at what your potential costs and income might be like to see if your business idea could actually make an operating profit. The start date doesn't matter for this.

The ramp up plan is the plan that takes you from nothing to operating. Many businesses will have a period of setup where they are just incurring costs and not taking any sales yet. When they do take sales, it takes a while before they increase to a respectable amount. If you want to model this then start your plan on the first month you think you will start incurring costs.