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Did the same thing you are/were thinking about... bought BPP in 90s and updated to 2006 version.

They seem to have good ideas, but it is one of the most sluggish and awkward user interfaces that have ever used.

But, kinda stuck with it now.

Eg... no way to expand 'plan outline' to various levels with out expanding all and then going back to list and collapsing each individual topic. Ie MS Project had same problem in 90s but they at least corrected that in later versions.

Have also been trying to find a discussion forum dedicated to BPP but no luck yet, please let me know if you know of any.

Thanks.

This came up in a discussion today, and I wondered: Did you purchase Business Plan Pro? If so, how is it working? If not, what did you select instead? Thanks for any info you can provide!

That's what I was asking . . . won't know until they answer.

SBA endorses it and some SCORE counselors apparently push it (and that's why I was asked about it yesterday) -- thought that might be the reason this post was made.

IMHO 'to use or not to use BPP' is one of those questions where there are enough pluses and minuses on both sides to make it very difficult to answer.
As I said b4, there are some good ideas and it produces a good final report presentation, but, the user interface makes it very time consuming and frustrating to use... especially if you are at all skilled working with programs like Excel and Word.
BPPs 'spread sheets' are meaningful but very limited and not at all 'customizable', and, its text documents are well intentioned but again have very limited word processing capabilities.
And its difficult to work with as a multi-page document as a whole (eg, cant search for words in the document, cant easily get to or re-arrange pages from the clumsy outline navigator as I noted in a previous post, etc).
Its not easy to say one way or the other... but dont think I would have bought it if I knew what I know now about it.

I have used BPP before and I thik its a great product to give you Ideas and samples to go off of. Since you can export to Word I usually start my Biz Plan in BPP export it and alter it to my objective. All and all I think its a good deal. I also was able to buy the bundled BPP software which cam with a copy of "The Art of the Start," not sure if they still offer that but it was good info.