How Prophet addresses the “80-20” problem in modeling

Building a new financial model tends to follow the “80/20” rule: 80% of the model takes 20% of the time to build, while the subtle tweaks and nuances - the remaining 20% - takes 80% of the time. Many have tried building shareable spreadsheet templates to streamline the 80%, and while this is a great idea in theory, spreadsheet templates don’t provide enough guidance or a friendly enough form factor to engender trust. When you open up a spreadsheet template, it’s clear where to input assumptions but it’s much harder to fully understand what formulas are calculating behind the scenes. So when you inevitably need to change something, these inflexible and difficult to read templates cause more headaches than they’re worth.

Prophet’s smart templates alleviate both the “80%” and “20%” problems.

First, our smart templates help users build great financial models fast. These models are tailored to the lines of business, subsector, corporate structure and desired detail of outputs for any business. Second, the human readability of our models make them easy to understand, edit and share.

For startups and SMBs looking to raise capital or sell their business can think of Prophet like TurboTax for your financial model. After entering some quick information about your business, our smart templates will create a financial model architecture for you in minutes. Then, our step-by-step instructions will guide you through inputting historical numbers and assumptions and we’ll do the rest to spin up a detailed, driver-based financial model that you can review in our web application or download to Excel.

For more experienced modelers, our smart templates handle the 80% while still providing you flexibility to add new assumptions, edit drivers and formulas or change outputs. We automate the 80% without the barriers and headaches of reading, understanding and editing an inflexible spreadsheet template to finish the remaining 20%.