Businessplan

Businessplan is the document a pharmacy writes when it is founded, taken over or expanded. It has a narrative half and a numbers half. The narrative describes the concept, the location and its catchment, the range of services, the competition, the staffing and the qualifications the plan depends on. The numbers half carries the investment and the financing requirement, the forecast of turnover and costs, and the month by month view of the bank account.

The readers are few and specific. A bank reads it to decide whether to lend and on what terms. A Steuerberater reads it to check whether the assumptions behind the figures hold together. The chamber and the supervisory authority are concerned with the premises and the personnel rather than with the profitability. The owner is the only reader who keeps using the document after the financing is signed, and only if it was written in a form that can later be compared with what actually happened.

A new service line belongs in the plan as its own short chapter with its own numbers. That is not a formality. Almost everything else in the document is a continuation of the past, and a bank can sanity check a dispensing business against figures it already knows from other pharmacies. The service is the part it cannot check that way, so it is the part it reads closely. Giving it its own investment figure, its own line in the Rentabilitätsvorschau and its own Break-even point makes it possible to discuss, whereas folding it into the general turnover line makes the whole forecast look optimistic without saying why.

Two annexes carry most of the weight in the conversation. The Liquiditätsplanung shows whether the account stays solvent through the months in which the investment is paid for and the revenue has not yet arrived. The calculation of Kapitaldienstfähigkeit shows whether the surplus covers interest and repayment once tax and the owner's living costs are taken out. A plan that is honest about a thin first year reads better than one in which every line rises smoothly, because the honest version can be defended in the meeting.

How the investment and the running costs are recognised for tax, and in which year, depends on the legal form and on the individual situation of the pharmacy, and it belongs with the Steuerberater before the plan is finalised.