Costs and Your Bottom Line
Once you have your fishing business off the ground, determining how your costs are measuring up against your income becomes a top priority. Alaska Sea Grant has developed an Excel spreadsheet tool specifically for Alaska fishermen to help do this.
You will need Microsoft Excel to use this tool.
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.
This kind of analysis is just a first step to making better business decisions. Remember, neither your annual tax return nor a rough estimate of cash-in/cash-out (such as this tool), are substitutes for actual long-term business planning.
See the Financial Statements page on this website for more detailed financial tools that are the basis of a complete business plan.
The "Pro Forma Fishing Vessel Operational Analysis" workbook below can help get a more detailed look at your fishing business costs and the required cash flow.
Resources
Use this Excel workbook to analyze various “what-if” scenarios in your fishing business. Enter predicted fuel, bait, gear, moorage, crew, and insurance costs and see how each changes your bottom line. You can look at the impact of different loan interest rates, or targeting different salmon species, or adjusting your days at sea.
The workbook consists of 8 linked worksheets. The one titled “Main Sheet” is your final product. The other 7 sheets, automatically linked to the main sheet, are where you enter information in the input fields outlined in green. Click to enable macros when opening.
Use the series of videos produced by Greg Fisk and the University of Minnesota to learn how to work with financial spreadsheets.
Instructions for using the Pro Forma Fishing Vessel Operational Analysis workbook.