Business case against business plan

The do nothing option is the one that matters

Every honest business case compares at least three options, and one of them is changing nothing. That baseline is what makes the numbers mean anything, because the benefit of a project is never its total value; it is the difference between the future with it and the future without it. Cases that skip the baseline tend to claim the whole revenue of a process as a benefit, which is how a two hundred thousand dollar system ends up justified by savings that were already going to happen. Writing the do nothing option properly also has a political use. It forces the sponsor to state the cost of inaction in the same currency as the cost of action, and quite often the case gets stronger rather than weaker once that comparison is on the page.

What a plan has that a case does not

A business plan has to answer questions a case never asks: who the customers are, why they will buy, who the competitors are, how the business is staffed and structured, what it costs to run for a year with no sales, and what the founders will do if the first assumption is wrong. It also carries the sections a lender or investor reads first, which are usually the financial statements and the team page rather than the market analysis. A case assumes the business already exists and that its context is understood by the reader. That assumption is what lets a case be short, and it is exactly what makes a case useless as a fundraising document.

Numbers that have to reconcile

Both documents lose credibility in the same place, which is arithmetic that does not add up between the narrative and the tables. In a case, the benefit stated in the summary has to match the benefit in the cash flow, and the cost has to include the things people leave out: internal staff time, licence increases after year one, training, decommissioning the old system and the contingency. In a plan, the revenue in the profit and loss has to be reachable from the customer numbers in the market section, and the cash flow has to show the month the business is at its lowest balance. A reader who finds one number that does not reconcile stops trusting all of them, and they usually check the easiest one first.

Where each document ends

A business case has a defined end. It is approved or declined, and if approved the next document is the charter, which converts the approval into authority for a named person. Continuing to update the case after approval is a common waste, because the assumptions it holds have been superseded by the plan. A business plan has no end, and the useful version is the one revised annually with actuals against the prior forecast. Plans that are written once for a bank and never reopened are a familiar pattern, and the cost is not the document itself but the loss of the only record of what the founders expected, which is the thing that makes the following year's forecast better.

Building either as a document

Both are long documents, planned section by section rather than written in one pass, and both carry a cover, running headers and a table of contents. Contents are only used at long scale, and the headings have to match the entries exactly for page numbers to resolve. Tables and the six chart types carry the financials, and the four key values layouts suit the summary figures at the front. Note that documents do not print citations: research grounds the content but sources are not listed, so any market figure a reader will challenge should be attributed in the body text you write yourself. Ten theme presets and seven cover layouts are available, and a plain corporate cover reads better to a lender than a decorative one.

Questions people ask