Crunching Numbers All Day Long

This past week of online learning was very busy in all of my classes, but I feel like I managed my time well as I was able to make really great progress on my Final Product. After all of my research about the financial plan portion of my business plan and a discussion with Ms. George over the phone, I was able to get most of my financial projections done. Before actually starting on the number crunching of all of that, I did a lot of research on current and previous industry trends in order to get an idea of how my revenue and costs will shape over time. In our discussion, Ms. George mentioned the importance of looking at monthly jewelry retail trends to see when sales have been historically higher than other months. It was very interesting to analyze these trends as I was surprised to see how different holidays and seasonal trends shape sales significantly. Jewelry sales in the past few years have been especially high during November, December, February, April, and May going along with holidays like Christmas, Valentines Day, and Mother’s Day. So with this in mind, I began forecasting monthly values for my revenue, direct costs, expenses, and dividends to finally create a three-year profit & loss statement. I am definitely proud of what I accomplished as this is definitely a big step in my business plan.