Welcome back to part 4 of our 5 parts series on Annual Planning.

If you’re late to the planning party, here’s a snapshot of our syllabus:

Part I: The Kickoff

  • Who’s involved in annual planning?

  • Bottoms up vs tops Down forecasting

  • Guiding questions and guardrails

Part II: Building sales capacity

  • Modeling out rep ramp time

  • Pod ratios: Business Development Reps, System Engineers, and Sales Managers

  • Quota deployment and over assignment (shhhh!)

Part III: Designing a marketing budget

  • Modeling Pipeline Coverage and understanding the marketing funnel

  • Working with your CMO to develop a “GL pick list”

  • Programs vs People cost split

Part IV: Costing out the P&L (This post!)

  • Modeling headcount as an input, and a driver

  • Forecasting non-people costs

  • Developing a mutually exclusive list of expense types

Part V: Bringing it all together

  • Modeling P&L by cost type vs P&L by department

  • Checking your outputs: CAC Payback, ARR per head, cash runway

  • Five year plan tie in

This guide comes from thousands of hours on the job, designing annual plans for multi billion dollar tech companies. And it’s strongly influenced by the hundreds of hours spent with my entrepreneur friends who are building their very first budgets.

Today we’ll show you how to fully burden your P&L - a fancy way of saying “find a home for all the stuff you spend money on".

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