Show HN: Review my startup idea – financial forecasting for small businesses

It's not clear to me whether you're building a financial model in Excel, which will then be automatically updated with actual data (for periods which have been completed), or whether Excel is just a way for you to gather the initial data.

You're solving a worthwhile problem, as most businesses could do with planning better and thinking more about the key drivers of cash flow.

If you are targeting businesses that are looking for investment, then presumably you'll need to output an Excel-based model that investors can inspect (for correctness) and play with (to test the impact of different assumptions). It sounds hard to automate that unless you create a bunch of templates for different types of business with different growth drivers and revenue/cost structures. You could probably build one which could be used by most SaaS businesses, for instance, and another for restaurants and cafes etc.

I've found that getting people to explain to you how their business will work is the hard part. Building the Excel model once you have complete answers is the easy bit. Updating it for an ongoing business, and integrating actuals alongside projections, is a little more tricky.