Pro Forma Financial Statements: Examples What Is a Pro Forma? Video & Lesson Transcript

For cases in which your company is specifically seeking funding, you want to show your potential investors how the company’s financial results will change with their investment. There may be several sets of these pro forma documents, each based on different potential investment amounts, or just one based on what you think you need.

Remember that creating Pro forma income and financial statements are essentially best guesses. Remember to continually update the projections in your pro forma to ensure ongoing accuracy. Your costs will be your lease, employee pay, insurance, licenses, permits, materials, etc. To create the first part of your pro forma you’ll use the revenue projections from Step 1 and the total liabilities and costs found here. Now the income statement, balance sheet, and other data can be used to create the statement of cash flows. Companies in the U.S. follow Generally Accepted Accounting Principles as a best practice. While GAAP standards set guidelines on reporting information accurately and transparently, sometimes it’s useful to include or exclude information.

Implications of Business Risk

If she wins in Vegas, her net worth can be positive; with her loan paid off entirely, her asset value will equal her net worth. However, if she loses in Vegas, she will have to borrow more, her new debt quadrupling her liabilities and decreasing her net worth by that much more. Say you’re a business owner contemplating a loan to invest in more efficient equipment. Your current equipment still works, but the cutting edge technology in newer machines can speed up production by 20%. Creditors might also get insecure due to higher financial leverage situation of a company as this might violate existing debt covenants that are in place. ● investing activities such as movements in capital assets including building, equipment, land, business acquisitions, etc. Add the cash receipts from sales, interest, loans and other items to the cash on hand.

Without historical financial statements, financial analysis and evaluation would not be possible and management, board members, investors, and customers would be largely in the dark about how well an organization has done. https://www.bookstime.com/ are similar to historical financial statements in appearance and use, except that they focus on the future instead of the past and are based upon assumptions rather than hard fact. Historical statements should be real, solid, and scientific, while pro forma statements allow management to exercise a certain amount of creativity and flexibility. Pro forma statements reflect a dynamic environment in which change is still possible and a variety of different alternatives can be followed. They take the same forms as historical statements, the most common being the income statement, the balance sheet, and the statement of changes in financial position. A financial forecast may be used in lieu of pro forma financial statements. According to the SEC, this does not take the place of the pro forma balance sheet, but the pro forma income statement may be withheld.

What Are the Different Types of Pro Forma Reports?

Using pro forma results to grossly misconstrue GAAP-based results and mislead investors is deemed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to be fraudulent and punishable by law. Pro forma financials in the United States boomed in the late 1990s when dot-com companies used the method to make losses appear like profits or, at a minimum, to reveal much greater gains than indicated through U.S. Pro forma, Latin for “as a matter of form” or “for the sake of form”, is a method of calculating financial results using certain projections or presumptions. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance degree from Bridgewater State University and has worked on print content for business owners, national brands, and major publications. If a user or application submits more than 10 requests per second, further requests from the IP address may be limited for a brief period. Once the rate of requests has dropped below the threshold for 10 minutes, the user may resume accessing content on SEC.gov.

But generally, these are the steps you need to take to create them—and the info your pro forma statements should include. Looking at both best case and worst case scenarios helps you make financial decisions based on challenges you may face in the future. For instance, what happens if your main vendor raises their prices like they did last year? Or how will that proposed transaction of buying new equipment impact you long term?

Definition of Pro Forma Financial Statement

Since the dot-com bubble burst, the SEC has cracked down on using pro forma financials to protect the public from being misled. Before delivering an actual invoice, send a client a pro forma invoice that lists the cost of the goods and services you’re planning to provide. A pro forma invoice isn’t binding; it’s a way to make sure you and the client are on the same page before agreeing to the transaction.

• However, if she loses in Vegas, she will have to borrow more, her new debt quadrupling her liabilities and decreasing her net worth by that much more.
• Should the company proceed to purchase the machinery, its effect on the revenues needs to be considered.
• Your current equipment still works, but the cutting edge technology in newer machines can speed up production by 20%.
• A pro forma income statement is a document that shows a business’s adjusted income if certain financial inputs were removed.
• Plan for the future, by considering best, worst, and most likely case scenarios in detail.
• He can always offer the person a full-time job after his projection actualizes.

The presumptions about hypothetical conditions that occurred in the past and/ or may occur in the future are used to project the most likely outcome for corporate results in reports known as pro forma financial statements. There are several reasons why a bank may ask for pro forma financial statements. One reason may be that the bank wants to make sure that the business is able to repay the loan.

Pro-Forma Income Statement

Likewise, businesses use this information to paint a picture of future success to persuade potential investors and/or to maintain the confidence in their current investors. If you want to create your own pro forma financial statement, there are numerous templates available online for free.

These financial statements are based on what someone thinks will happen in the future. This is not an indication that what appears on pro forma statements will actually happen. While there is a science in predicting weather trends and how severe it will be, their predictions are not 100%.

Alice can actually project how her financial statements will look after each choice is followed. To project future financial statements, you need to be able to envision the expected results of all the items on them. This can be difficult, for there can be many variables that may affect your income and expenses or cash flows , and some of them may be unpredictable. Predictions always contain uncertainty, so projections are always, at best, educated guesses.

Pro forma invoices

Line items like income tax expense, on the other hand, typically don’t change directly with sales. Stable businesses can generally estimate income tax expense as a percentage of income before taxes. Pro forma taxes are figured by taking your estimated tax rate—in this case, 30 percent—and multiplying it by the pro forma profit before taxes of $235,000.

• Projected results for financial statements in the future, given assumptions about what will happen in the meantime.
• For cases in which your company is specifically seeking funding, you want to show your potential investors how the company’s financial results will change with their investment.
• The purpose of a pro forma invoice is typically to provide enough information for customs to calculate the duties for the included products.
• Public companies release pro forma financials under the guise of clarifying their financial position after a business acquisition.
• A balance sheet shows a company’s financial position by estimating assets, liabilities, and equity.
• This information is crucial in making informed decisions about events or transactions that could have a significant impact on the company.
• Cash flow differs from NI because, underaccrual accounting, certain revenues and expenses are recognized prior to or after cash changes hands.

Although pro forma statements can be an insightful way to explore hypothetical scenarios, it’s important to remember that they’re based on assumptions, not facts. As such, there’s always a possibility that the scenarios projected by your pro forma financial statements are going to be wildly inaccurate. Therefore, it’s important to be cautious when evaluating these sorts of financial statements and use them alongside other financial documents to get a clearer picture of the business’s actual finances. A corporation may want to see the effects of three possible financing options. Therefore, it prepares a projected balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows for each of the three financing options. These projected financial statements are referred to as pro forma financial statements. When a bank requests pro forma financial statements, it is making assumptions about the future financial performance of the company.

Pro Forma Income Statement Example

Cash flow from operations includes cash inflows from customer payments, and cash outflow for material purchases and payroll costs. Sally learns from this statement that she projects $185,000 in current assets and $150,000 in liabilities, which gives her $35,000 in owner’s equity.

For this projection, you need to determine where in your company the investments would be parlayed. For example, you may be able to add the investment onto the balance sheet under the cash row in the historical with acquisition pro forma template, or you may have to divide the investment under multiple rows.

How Can You Use Pro Forma Reports?

He covers banking, loans, investing, mortgages, and more for The Balance. He has an MBA from the University of Colorado, and has worked for credit unions and large financial firms, in addition to writing about personal finance for more than two decades. And deduct it – as well as any other operating expenses – from your sales. “What if” is one of those key turns of phrase that business owners need to think about virtually all the time. Get financed, by showing lenders or investors how you would use their money to sustainably grow your business. Investopedia requires writers to use primary sources to support their work.

Allows you to create pro forma statements and make changes as needed. You can make pro forma adjustments based on new information and use these statements to find opportunities, reduce risk, and increase profits. Unfortunately, there are also disadvantages that accompany pro forma financial statements. Pro forma is a Latin term that roughly translates to “as a matter of form,” and is most often used to describe a document that is based on financial assumptions or projections, such as a pro forma balance sheet. Pro forma financial statements might show the expected impact of any projects in the pipeline. For example, they may assume a company plans to build a new facility to produce more goods for customers.

More Business Planning Topics

Calculate the estimated revenue projections for your business, a process called pro forma forecasting. Use realistic market assumptions and not just numbers that make you or your investors feel optimistic. Do your research and speak with experts and accountants to determine what a normal annual revenue stream is, as well as asset accumulation assumptions.

Since there are no set rules while making such a pro forma, companies tend to manipulate their financial earnings. Companies can exclude anything it believes that conceals their true financial performance. Pro forma profit and loss statements can also be used to calculate the financial ratios.

If it is an annual period, the document should also align with the company’s filed GAAP-approved financial statements. Assumptions form the bedrock of pro forma statements; hence, a reliable pro forma statement is a financial model prepared Pro Forma Financial Statements on the back of realistic and justifiable assumptions. Finance professionals and business owners need to consider all the likely scenarios that affect the finances of a company in order to come up with accurate financial forecasts.