I know, you are eager to start with your financial model and to start filling in the numbers. But before that, it is useful to decide couple of key things for your model. This couple of things represent the main inputs in our Feanut financial model, but they are necessary in whatever Excel spreadsheet you will work with or you will develop on your own. So here are 5 things to do as a first step towards your financial model:

1. Company name - fill in your company name. If you develop your own model, make sure you have the field where you can populate your company name and make sure that this is linked into another parts of the model where it is required. For example into the headers of financial statements or into the presentation worksheets. This will save you time later as you will not need to manually type the name of your company in the worksheet multiple times.
2. Start date - depending on whether your model is monthly, quarterly or annual, select the first period of your model. In Feanut financial model, you select the date of start of your business. Based on that the model will automatically update all the headers in all the financial schedules accross the model.
3. Fiscal year vs. Calendar year - is your fiscal year equal to your calendar year? This is an important question, because base on that the model will select individual months to be summarized on an annual basis. If your start date is for example May 2016 and you set that your fiscal year equals calendar year, then your first modeled year will only contain months from May to December and therefore will not be comparable on a year-over-year basis with the following years.
4. Currency - this is the same as the company name. Fill in your currency symbol in just one place in your model and then link it wherever you might need it. In Feanut financial model this is the way we did that. So you fill in the currency symbol in the main inputs worksheets and it is then automatically updated in all the tables, charts, statements and summaries.
5. Presentation units - finally, you should decide in what units you want the final results to be presented. While you can populate the data inputs in full numbers including decimal points, you probably don't want your investor to read something like "$8 546 291.35" in your executive summary. Instead you should show him "$8.5m". So you can tell the model to automatically convert the results to millions or thousands. Our model then converts the results in all presentation worksheets and charts accordingly.