Business Plan Pro is one of those products where the name tells you exactly what you’re going to get. In this case, you get a set of tools to create a professional business plan which can be used both by budding entrepreneurs and existing companies to garner interest, raise finance and generally encapsulate their business aims.

A word of warning, though. If you’re expecting to simply press a couple of buttons and see a finished business plan roll off the printer, then think again.

Business Plan Pro can take care of the mechanics, with wizards to guide you through the process, advise on what to put in and what to leave out. It can also help with the design and layout of the document, handle the financial forecasting and show you how others have gone about the process, with over 500 sample business plans included.

However, it’s no substitute for a good idea, and you’ll be asked lots of questions to which you’ll need to know the answers if the results are to have any credibility.

You don’t need fancy hardware to use Business Plan Pro, just a Windows PC, but you will need plenty of time and patience. The program itself is easy to install, the interface straightforward and for speed you could just modify an existing plan. However, few businesses are exactly alike and most users will opt to create a new plan from scratch.

It’s here that the patience comes in handy, with a long wizard-driven checklist that you’ll need to go through, designed as much to make you think about what’s important when setting up a new business as documenting your ideas and making financial forecasts.

To this end the package comes with a useful book, Start your business week by week, by entrepreneur Jonathan Elvidge, plus lots of other documents and links to information sources.

Tracking down advice on the type of legal entity to go for and the tax implications can be a chore when you first start out, so new tutorials have also been added along with free online training sessions and special offers to, for example, save money on designing your company logo and incorporating a business.

The user interface comes in for a lot of tweaking in the latest 2007 edition and we particularly appreciated the new full-screen mode when we got to the document design phase. The embedded glossary, which helps demystify what can be quite baffling business jargon, is also good.

The plan review process has also been enhanced and we found the overall approach of this package very refreshing. Reading sample business plans also gave unique insights into what was important, while the questions asked by the package further helped concentrate the mind.

We also liked the options in the Premier version (£129.99 ex VAT) to import data from Excel and produce Powerpoint presentations to help get your ideas over.

It’s worth just reiterating that Business Plan Pro can’t do everything and that the content of the plan is down to you. It needs to make financial sense and it has to be readable, so buy this affordable package by all means but still have the results proofread, and the figures checked out by an accountant.

After all, you’ll probably only get one chance to pitch your ideas and it’s worth the extra effort to present the results of this excellent application in the best possible light.