How to Make a Pro-forma Income Statement for a New Startup

While it’s helpful to know what a company’s management has planned, it’s important to view these projections with skepticism. Nobody can predict the future, and managers might use overly optimistic assumptions in their pro formas. One of the major drawbacks is that it is just a mere projection, the future of which is uncertain. If the assumptions are inaccurate, it may lead to inaccurate planning and execution. Past data may not always help to paint the correct picture in a dynamic and ever-changing business environment. The sample pro forma statements below may look different from the statements you create, depending on what your template looks like. But generally, these are the steps you need to take to create them—and the info your pro forma statements should include.

Your business might benefit by following the SEC guidelines for public companies outlining how to use pro forma statements, even if you’re not a publicly traded business. The hypothetical scenarios in pro forma financials can help analysts predict risks early and prepare for them before making any concrete changes. Pro forma statements can significantly benefit businesses by offering data for planning and predicting future economic changes, analyzing risks, securing funding, and making merging/selling decisions. While pro forma often refers to assumptions about future events, it can also refer to financial reports with irregular transactions removed. For example, if a company experienced significant restructuring charges in a given period, a pro forma might show how the company would have performed if those charges never occurred.

What Is a Pro Forma Financial Statement?

The pro forma income statement computes how much money a business will make after all expenses have been subtracted from total revenues. The pro forma balance sheet displays information about everything a company owns and all debt that it owes. It also computes how much the company is worth, after total liabilities have been subtracted from total assets. Pro forma financial statements are best prepared before any major transactions are entered into, so that business decision makers feel more assured that they can meet company goals. This is called managerial accounting, or when decision-makers prepare financial statements to meet proposed company goals. The pro forma cash flow statement, income statement, and balance sheet should not be confused for standard financial statements, that also include the cash flow statement, income statement, and the balance sheet. Pro forma documents are statements that are based on interpretations of the future; not how well a company is financially performing presently.

• Using pro forma results to grossly misconstrue GAAP-based results and mislead investors is deemed by the U.S.
• Financial statements, including the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement, based on a set of assumptions.
• To ensure our website performs well for all users, the SEC monitors the frequency of requests for SEC.gov content to ensure automated searches do not impact the ability of others to access SEC.gov content.
• A university press most often uses proforma statements in connection with its annual operating budget and long-term financial planning process.

If analysis of your pro formas indicates that problems lie ahead, there should still be time to make adjustments and to improve your press’s financial performance. A quicker but often less accurate method of projecting a pro forma balance sheet involves using the historical relationships between different financial statement items to calculate the pro forma account balances. If you are going to have a very late list or plan to publish a blockbuster just before year-end, then the normal year-end historical relationship between annual sales volume and accounts receivable will not hold. Accounts receivable will be higher than normal as a percent of sales billings. A complete balance sheet can be put together using this method, but you should be aware of its shortfalls. Pro forma income statements usually project a minimum of three years, whereas regular income statements may just be the year prior or based upon a lender’s request. According to the SEC, when required for public companies, pro forma income statements are required for the fiscal year, but not for interim periods.

How Pro Forma Financial Statements Can Help Your Business

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• You could deliver to them two sets of pro forma financial statements, and two risk assessment templates to use to discover their best option.
• Shareholders are investors who have purchased stock, or a percentage of the company.
• They do not follow generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, which are general reporting requirements that all U.S. business must follow.
• A corporation may want to see the effects of three possible financing options.
• Financial accounting creates pro forma statements for reporting a company’s earning while excluding any nonrecurring or unusual transactions.
• The loss your business incurs because of the cat widgets really makes a big dent in your income, so you decide to stop manufacturing and selling cat widgets.

If so, they may issue pro forma financial statements that include the corrections they believe are necessary to provide a better view of the business. The Securities and Exchange Commission takes a dim view of this kind of adjusted reporting, and has issued regulations about it in their Regulation G. Investors should be aware that a company’s pro forma financial statements may hold figures or calculations that are not in compliance with generally accepted accounting principles . Sometimes, pro forma figures differ vastly from those generated within a GAAP framework, as pro forma results will make adjustments to GAAP numbers to highlight important aspects of the company’s operating performance.

Creating a pro forma income statement

In managerial accounting, pro forma financial statements are meant to help managers make business decisions. By doing so, managers can decide which business decisions look more beneficial and which ones to avoid. Assuming Bob wants to open a new shop in the future, but he anticipates that he will not have the capital to do so. Bob will prepare his pro forma financial statements to determine the impact of this decision on the profitability, financial position and cash flow position of his business.

It also advised comparing the pro forma and actual statements to understand them better. Looking at both best case and worst case scenarios helps you make financial decisions based on challenges you may face in the future. For instance, what happens if your main vendor raises their prices like they did last year? Or how will that proposed transaction of buying new equipment impact you long term? Pro Forma Financial Statements Risk analysis lets you take the future for a test ride, and try out different outcomes. It’s illegal for publicly traded companies to mislead investors with pro forma financial results that do not use the most conservative possible estimates of revenue and expense. She is an expert in personal finance and taxes, and earned her Master of Science in Accounting at University of Central Florida.

Business Insights

This is not an indication that what appears on pro forma statements will actually happen. While there is a science in predicting weather trends and how severe it will be, their predictions are not 100%.

Other factors can affect sales, including seasonality, marketing, customer service, and new product launches. An income statement shows a company’s profitability by taking revenues minus expenses. For example, sales might be presented as 15% higher , 5% higher , 20% lower .

What It Means for Individual Investors

If material costs increase sharply, or there is a shortage of labor, the cost of sales will increase. Projections about the future are not required to follow the strictest accounting standards, but companies must avoid committing fraud when creating pro formas. Next, identify any adjustments to your current assets/liabilities that may vary depending on the sales variance that you’ve used in your projection. They’re an extremely helpful tool for business planning, https://www.bookstime.com/ as they enable you to conduct side-by-side comparisons based on different financial assumptions that can help you decide between two proposals or potential strategies. Since there are no set rules while making such a pro forma, companies tend to manipulate their financial earnings. Companies can exclude anything it believes that conceals their true financial performance. Pro forma profit and loss statements can also be used to calculate the financial ratios.

This helps you realize the range of outcomes your startup can realistically expect in terms of your income. Whether you “might” lose an account or make an acquisition, pro forma financial statements allow a glimpse into the future. The foundation of a pro forma income statement focuses on various assumptions to make accurate quarterly or annual projections of revenue and expenses. Jack travels to Doggie Dogs’ headquarters to review their financials and create a pro-forma balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows.

About Pro Forma Statements

The articles and research support materials available on this site are educational and are not intended to be investment or tax advice. All such information is provided solely for convenience purposes only and all users thereof should be guided accordingly. ScaleFactor is on a mission to remove the barriers to financial clarity that every business owner faces. The Smartsheet platform makes it easy to plan, capture, manage, and report on work from anywhere, helping your team be more effective and get more done. Report on key metrics and get real-time visibility into work as it happens with roll-up reports, dashboards, and automated workflows built to keep your team connected and informed.

• Companies are motivated to have aggressive goals for business performance.
• For example, sales might be presented as 15% higher , 5% higher , 20% lower .
• Some examples of these excluded transactions include restructuring costs, declining investment values or prior year’s accounting errors.
• Because it’s impossible to predict the future, pro forma financial statements should only be considered an estimate.
• For example, if it’s currently April and you want to perform a full-year pro forma projection, you would account for all the financials up to April and project the remainder of the year.
• As an example, he explained that if the base case is that revenue grows by 20% over the next few years, one may want to lower that projected growth rate to, say, 10%, to see how the firm’s financials look.

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