Module 4, FP&A
Capital Toolkit FP&A turns your CPA-reviewed general ledger into a forward-looking financial plan. Budget vs actual variance, three-driver projections, KPI dashboards, scenario modeling. The CFO view of your business, without the CFO salary.
Last year's revenue. Last quarter's gross margin. Last month's payroll. Your accounting system is good at one thing: telling you what already happened. It doesn't tell you what next quarter looks like, or what happens if your largest supplier raises prices 12%, or whether you can afford to hire two more people.
Most small business owners answer those questions in their head, or in a spreadsheet that gets out of sync within a month. The spreadsheet uses one growth rate, “up 5% a year”, that doesn't separate inflation from pricing power from volume. It can't model two scenarios side-by-side. It silently drifts away from the books it was built from.
The result: every important decision is made on intuition. Hiring, pricing, capital purchases, financing requests, acquisition offers. Sometimes the intuition is right, and sometimes it isn't.
Capital Toolkit FP&A gives you the CFO discipline — the budget, the forecast, the variance, the scenarios — without the CFO salary. Built on the same ledger your accountant signs off on.
How it projects
For every revenue and cost line, the projection engine splits year-over-year change into three drivers. You can default them from the Bank of Canada or you can override per scenario. The output is multiplicative compounding, not additive, closer to how a real business actually grows.
Driver 1 · Inflation
Default from the Bank of Canada CPI release (12-month change), 2% fallback. Applied symmetrically to revenue and cost of sales because over time, prices and input costs both inflate. Override per scenario if you have reason to.
Driver 2 · Real change
Captures pricing power on revenue (you raised prices 3% faster than CPI) and input-cost pressure on cost of sales (your supplier raised faster than CPI). Two different numbers; you set each per line. Where the strategic conversation actually lives.
Driver 3 · Volume
The growth rate everyone actually means when they say “growth.” Same multiplier applied to revenue and cost of sales because cost of sales is variable per unit. Hold volume flat in a stress scenario, scale it up in the bull case.
Math: value_y = value_0 × ∏ (1 + driver_y). Multiplicative per year. The compounding is what makes three-year and five-year projections track reality instead of drifting.
What the module does
Last year's actuals as a starting point, then your operating assumptions for the year ahead. Department-level, month-level, line-level. CPAs build it; owners review and approve.
Three- to five-year rolling projection using the three- driver engine. P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow all tied together. Use it for financing applications, acquisition prep, or just to know if next year is going to work.
Budget vs actual at every level, refreshed as the ledger posts. Drill from a top-line miss into the specific account that drove it. Flag the variances that need explanation before the board meeting.
What if rent goes up 8% and volume stays flat? What if the largest customer leaves? Versioned, side-by-side, no spreadsheet drift. Each scenario is a saved projection run you can come back to.
How it works
FP&A is CPA-led: your accountant runs the cadence, you participate from the owner portal. Most engagements settle into a monthly or quarterly review rhythm after the first plan lands.
Module reads your shared general ledger, Books, Financial Statements Bridge, or statement-summary entry. No re-keying, no copy-paste. Each revenue and cost line maps to a projection line.
Inflation defaults from Bank of Canada CPI. CPA sets the real-change defaults per line based on industry norms and what they know about your business. You override per scenario.
Three- to five-year projection appears as a pro-forma P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow. Save it as a named scenario (Base / Bull / Bear / Refinance) and come back to compare against future actuals.
Variance dashboard refreshes as transactions post. CPA flags the variances that matter, you discuss the response. Board pack assembles from the live data, not a stale export.
What's inside
Line-by-line, month-by-month operating plan. Owner-approved, CPA-administered.
Inflation / real change / volume per line. Multiplicative compounding. Bank of Canada CPI default with override.
Refreshes as the ledger posts. Drill from top-line variance to the specific account.
Versioned, side-by-side scenarios. Base / Bull / Bear / specific decisions. No spreadsheet drift.
Gross margin, contribution margin, runway, AR days, AP days, working capital cycle. CPA configurable per industry.
Projected P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, tied together by the same drivers. Export-ready for a bank or a buyer.
Recurring review surface. CPA prepares the variance commentary; owner reviews the highlights, asks questions, approves the response.
Single-click export of the variance dashboard, the active scenario, and the KPI snapshot — board meeting ready, no formatting work.
Every driver change, every scenario save, every export captured. Survives a board challenge or a deal-side question.
Who it's for
You want a CFO view of your business — budget, forecast, variance, the scenario before the big decision — without the CFO salary. Your CPA runs the discipline. You see the dashboards and approve the plan.
Stop running FP&A in client-by-client spreadsheets that drift the day after they're built. One platform, one workflow, one engine. Charge $3,000 to $6,000 per month per engagement for a service that compounds your value to the client.
When your client is preparing for a financing application, a refinance, or a sale, the projection model is half the package. FP&A produces the pro-forma statements that survive lender or buyer scrutiny because the drivers are explicit.
Honest status
The three-driver projection engine is production-ready and unit-tested. The variance and scenario UI is in build-out — paid pilots welcome.
Status pilot: We're running early pilots with CPA firms who want to deliver fractional CFO engagements on the platform. If you're a CPA interested in being a pilot firm, book a demo.
What the projection model unlocks
FP&A sits in the middle of the stack: it reads the historicals from Books or Financial Statements, and feeds the projections every downstream surface depends on. A defensible three-year model is the single artifact most engagements end up citing.
Historicals come from the ledger. Clean books mean the driver fits are calibrated on reality, not on round numbers; variance reporting catches drift the first month it appears.
See module →If the bookkeeping lives in QB or Xero, the Financial Statements bridge produces the normalized historicals FP&A drivers calibrate against. Same outputs, different upstream path.
See module →DCF runs on the FP&A projection. The same driver assumptions document the upside and downside cases inside the valuation report — one source of truth across both.
See module →Lenders coverage-test the three-year projection against the proposed debt service. A well-documented FP&A model is what turns a maybe-fundable application into an approved one.
See module →Beyond the CSBFP cap, every conventional senior, ABL, equipment, and mezzanine package opens with the projection. Grant programs ask for the same forward model, scoped to the project.
See module →Buy-side modelling needs a pro-forma combined projection; sell-side needs a credible forward look to anchor the value. Both run on the same FP&A driver engine.
See module →Watch
Plain-English video explainers from the Capital Toolkit YouTube channel.
Twenty-minute demo. Bring last year's P&L and one decision you're trying to make — we'll run it through the three-driver model and show you the pro-forma your CPA would build for you.
Don't have a CPA on the platform yet? Sign up directly — your engagement is temporarily held by a CPA on the platform until you bring in your own. Your data is portable.
