Writing a business plan with a general AI assistant
A fair question, and the honest answer is that for the writing itself an assistant is genuinely good. What it cannot do is the part that decides whether the plan works.
Why there is no table here. There is nothing here to tabulate. A general assistant has no fixed feature set for a business plan — what it produces depends entirely on what you ask it for, which is both its strength and the reason a comparison grid would be meaningless.
So every statement below is about our product. Everything about the alternative is a question — take it to the source. www.anthropic.com/claude
Why people look at it
Because it works. Reviewers repeatedly report that a general assistant matches the prose quality of paid business-plan tools, and the writing problem in this category is essentially solved. If what you need is a well-structured draft to think against, you already have the tool.
What to ask
Our answer is stated in full under each one, so you can hold us to it as easily as you hold anyone else to theirs.
- Where do the numbers in the statements come from?
- An assistant writing a financial section is generating text that looks like a financial section. The figures are produced by the same process as the adjectives, and the ones that are wrong are wrong in a plausible way.
- Our answer. From a deterministic engine that a model cannot write to. The assistant proposes assumptions; the engine computes; the prose describes what it computed.
- Do the three statements reconcile with each other?
- Generated financial tables typically do not. Interest appears on the profit and loss but principal never leaves the cash flow; depreciation reduces profit but net book value never moves. It reads correctly and it does not tie.
- Our answer. Nine roll-forward checks and a balance-sheet assertion in every one of sixty periods, enforced by a randomised property test rather than by review.
- Are the citations real?
- This is the well-documented failure mode, and it is the most damaging one here specifically: a fabricated market statistic in a funding application is not a formatting error.
- Our answer. A source is kept only if it comes back with a retrievable http URL and an ISO date, and is dropped otherwise. When research is unavailable we return nothing and say why rather than composing something plausible.
- What happens when you revise something in month two?
- A plan lives in a chat thread until the moment it does not. Re-asking for one section produces prose that no longer agrees with the twelve sections you are not re-asking for.
- Our answer. Change a driver and every dependent figure and sentence updates together, with a snapshot and a diff. The consistency checker then refuses to export a document whose words and numbers disagree.
- Does a language model ever write a number that lands in a financial statement?
- This is the whole question. If prose and figures come from the same generator, nothing downstream can be trusted, and a plausible-sounding number is worse than an obviously wrong one because nobody catches it.
- Our answer. No. The engine is pure TypeScript with no model in it. A model proposes assumptions before the engine runs and describes results after it has run; a test asserts mechanically that every currency figure in generated prose traces to a value the engine computed.
- Is there a balance sheet, and does it balance in every period?
- A profit and loss and a cash flow can each look fine while contradicting each other. The balance sheet is what proves they do not — and its absence is the most common structural gap in this category.
- Our answer. Yes, monthly across sixty periods, with the tie row visible in the statements and asserted in every period. A randomised property test runs the engine over generated assumptions and checks it, which is how two real engine defects were found.
- What happens when you change a price after the plan is written?
- Every tool claims the numbers and the words cannot drift apart. The thing to test is whether that survives a revision, because that is when it breaks.
- Our answer. Every dependent figure updates — in the statements, the charts, and every sentence citing one — and a version snapshot is taken with a visible diff. Nothing is overwritten without a way back.
- Does anything block export when the prose contradicts the model?
- The classic failure is text claiming forty per cent growth against a model showing twelve. It is trivially findable by a reader, which is exactly why it costs so much when they find it.
- Our answer. Yes. Every marked figure in the narrative is extracted and matched against the model, and export stays locked until they reconcile. Twelve checks block and eight advise.
- Does it compute what a credit analyst computes?
- Founders submit plans; banks compute ratios. If the ratio is not in the document, the reader works it out using assumptions you did not choose.
- Our answer. Coverage by year against the threshold in force for the programme, the amortisation schedule, current ratio, debt to equity, sources and uses, and owner compensation as a named line. Thresholds are dated configuration with a source and a confidence level, printed beside the figure.
- Where do the market statistics come from, and do they carry a date?
- Unsourced market claims are the most commonly cited reason plans get rejected, and AI tools are notorious for citing reports that do not exist.
- Our answer. Live web search, and anything returned without a retrievable http source and an ISO date is dropped — including when the model is confident about it. With research unavailable we return nothing and say why, rather than composing a citation.
- Does the Excel export contain formulas or pasted values?
- A banker who wants to audit the model changes a driver and watches what moves. A workbook of pasted values cannot be audited, which is the point at which they go back to asking for a spreadsheet.
- Our answer. Live formulas over a Drivers sheet, so changing a driver recalculates revenue, margin, coverage and the debt schedule. A Filed sheet carries the engine's figures at export with a variance row that reads zero on open — or the workbook and the plan disagree.
- What does cancelling look like, and what is the refund policy?
- The reputational damage in this category is almost entirely here rather than in the software. It is worth two minutes before you enter a card.
- Our answer. The core purchase is one-time per plan and does not renew. The optional subscription cancels in one click, runs to the end of the period you paid for, and there is no form asking you to document what was unsatisfactory.
When not to choose us
A comparison page that concludes you should buy from us in every case is not a comparison page.
- You are thinking out loud and want a draft to react to. Start there — it is faster and it is free, and you can bring the thinking here afterwards.
- Nobody is going to check the numbers. If the plan is for you and you will not act on its figures, the machinery here is overhead.
- You want one conversation that also does everything else in your week.
Check the answers, then decide.
Generation and the full plan are free to read. You pay once, when you are ready to send it.