General business data

This page contains the summary of IBD main organizational features presented in General sub menu and some other sub menus. They organize your business project data and provide different service such as import/export, reporting and Help.

The business planning in IBD can be in general described with the following sequence of calculations: demand > delivery > output > sales > materials (including manufacture equipment and facilities) > personnel > total cost > gross profit > taxes > net profit > money.

This process consists of some parts, grouped in sub menus: General, Demand, Sales, Materials, Personnel, Profit, Taxes, Money, Results. In addition there are some organizational sub menus: Project, Edit, View, Window and Help.

Here some common sub menus are shortly described. Other descriptions you can see clicking the references above or in the end of the page. In the forms presented below the white fields are intended for data input, the blue ones are calculated or selected by IBD.

Times and units - this document (form) sets the project time layout: the planned and past periods and the years detailed by months. When you click the Apply to time range button after the left white fields were changed, the right time table presents all past and planned time units according to these changes. Simultaneously all time-dependent data in IBD database are reorganized according to this table. No existing data are lost for the time units included in the new time table.

Production and service - presents the list of all outputted products and services with their data.

Competitors - shows competing products (services) of other firms. This form looks like Production.

Prices - presents expected prices' trends of your and competing products and their use cost. When you input or change a product price or monthly use cost, the average monthly consumption cost is recalculated.

The button Graph shows the trends of the main parameters contained in the active document (form).

The button Help opens the current document help topic with cross-references, Index, Find and all other options of the Windows Help system .

The button Print report opens the IBD report preview for the document under focus, and the control bar for page navigation and printing. The report contains the main data of the document for all values of key fields (in this example - for all your and competing products and for all time units).

Consumers - describes possible customers or groups of customers for your and competing products. This form looks similar to Production (see above).

Each command of Results sub menu generates some IBD reports as the tables within a MS Word document representing the summary or one of main parts of the planning results. This document may be edited and formatted with addition of any your text analyzing the state of your firm, describing suppositions and decisions, and also IBD graphs and any other embedded objects. An example of Result reports is presented in the Results page.

This sub menu presents the usual commands of files control: New, Open, Save As, Exit and so on, and also data exchange between IBD database and external files:

Import - appends records to selected IBD tables from external files having the formats: MS Excel, MS FoxPro, Data Interchange Format (DIF), comma-separated text files (CSV). Via Excel or CSV also the data exchange with MS Access is available.

Export - creates external files having the specified formats (the same as for Import, see above) from the selected IBD tables. This form looks like Import.

IBD has some kinds of help: the Help menu, the Help topics called from each document (form) with references to other Help topics, tool tips for buttons and fields, the status bar help for a field or a button under focus, program messages, prompts and warnings.

The ' IBD Help topics' command of the Help menu opens the Help content allowing to choose parts and topics for IBD systematic learning. The Help content includes 3 main parts:

- 'What this means?' describes the purpose and meaning of each IBD document, its fields and how to use them.

- 'How to...?' explains in details what operations you need to do in order to achieve your goals, for example, to predict the demand for your outputted products (services). To get a useful advice, you first shall choose the part and the topic corresponding to your goal, read the instructions and simultaneously fulfill them in the program (the Help window is always on top).

- 'Sample project description' presents the example of business project and shows how to input the data in order to realize the conditions and relationships of the example and to obtain desired results.