How far could next year miss the revenue plan?
The board argues about three drivers every year: price, new volume, retention. Draw each as the range the evidence supports and the plan becomes a distribution with a P5 the board has already seen.
Finance Starter Monte Carlo Pro engine
After you install, this is the model to open.
What Will Next Year's Revenue Be, as a Range?
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
This one runs on a Pro engine, and every free install includes five full-quality runs on your own numbers, shared across all five Pro engines rather than five for each. After that, Pro is $199/year.
The answer
Twenty thousand simulated years:
- Revenue, mean
- $6.89M
- Revenue, P5 / P95
- $6.32M / $7.50M
- Gross profit, mean
- $4.27M
A board that has seen the P5 does not treat a $6.5M year as a miss: that is what presenting the range buys. As drivers firm up, replace ranges with committed numbers and rerun; the bridge narrows as the year gets decided, which is what a living plan looks like.
The model
Kept revenue plus new business: price uniform $84-$94 (undecided), retention uniform 87%-95% (genuinely unknown), new units triangular 34K-42K-52K from the sales plan.
| Price | uniform $84-$94 |
| New units | triangular 34K-42K-52K |
| Retention | uniform 87%-95% |
| Revenue and gross profit | simulated |
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
Next question
- How much of your risk is just the exchange rate?What Does the Exchange Rate Do to Profit?
- Does growth or margin move your profit more?How Do Growth and Margin Move EBITDA Together?
- How far apart are your best year and your worst?Base, Better, Worse: Save the Three Cases
- Which thirty invoices should you actually check?Pull a Fair Sample of Invoices to Check
- Which forecast should you actually quote?What Will Next Quarter's Fees Be?
- Is that client really slower or just one late invoice?Do These Two Clients Pay at the Same Speed?
Every model like this one, and the method behind them: Monte Carlo simulation.