Business Case Builder

The Business Case Builder is a free business case template that runs in your browser and does the arithmetic for you. Frame the decision, tie it to the business capabilities it changes, compare up to four options year by year, and finish with a document a review board can read: printed to PDF, pasted into Word or Google Docs, or exported as CSV. No sign-up, and nothing you type leaves your browser.

What a business case built here contains

  1. The decision: one sentence the decision-makers can approve or reject, with the sponsor and author.
  2. The strategic case: the problem or opportunity, the objectives it serves, and what happens if nothing is done.
  3. Business capabilities affected: each capability the investment changes, with its maturity today and its target maturity on a 1–5 scale.
  4. Options and financials: up to four options, each with year-by-year costs (capital, operating, people, software and services) and benefits (revenue, cost reduction, cost avoidance, quantified risk reduction), plus benefits that cannot be priced.
  5. Economic comparison: total cost and benefit, net present value, return on investment, internal rate of return, payback and discounted payback for every option, with a cumulative cash flow chart.
  6. Risks: a register with likelihood, impact, mitigation and owner, sorted by severity.
  7. Benefits realization: a measure, baseline, target and date for each benefit claimed.
  8. Implementation and assumptions: how the work is phased, and every assumption behind the numbers.

How the numbers are calculated

Every figure is entered as the change compared with doing nothing, so doing nothing is the baseline each option is measured against. Year 0 is the start of the investment and is not discounted.

  • Net present value (NPV) is the sum of each year’s net cash flow divided by (1 + r)t, where r is the discount rate and t the year. Use the rate your finance function sets.
  • Return on investment (ROI) is total benefit minus total cost, divided by total cost, undiscounted.
  • Payback is the point at which the running total of net cash flow turns positive and stays positive, interpolated within the year. Discounted payback does the same with discounted cash flows.
  • Internal rate of return (IRR) is the discount rate at which NPV is zero. It is shown only when the cash flows change sign once, because otherwise it is not uniquely defined.

An illustrative example to start from

One click loads a worked example: a fictional insurer choosing between improving its current claims process and replacing its claims platform. The organization and every figure in it are invented and labeled as such; the example shows how a finished case reads, including a recommendation for the option that is not the cheapest.

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