As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly write a business plan for your UK small business.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 1 hour until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open a document or spreadsheet and gather your offer, prices, business structure, location, founder experience, available funding, one-off costs, monthly costs and sales assumptions.
   2. Collect evidence for the customer and competitor sections, including competitor names, prices, public source links, customer conversations and any existing sales records.
   3. Paste the gathered information into the prompt, replacing each bracketed slot, and ask the chatbot to draft the plan while marking missing information instead of filling gaps.
   4. Paste the draft financial tables into a spreadsheet and compare every cost, price and sales assumption against your bank records, invoices, supplier quotes and current price list.
   5. Check market, legal and regulatory statements against current GOV.UK pages, and remove any claim that has no named source.
   6. Change the scenarios using figures you can defend, then check the cash-flow totals, break-even calculation and funding requirement with a spreadsheet.
   7. Send the completed plan and financial model to an accountant for tax or funding implications and to a solicitor for material legal or regulatory questions before relying on them.

   Prompt

   Write a practical business plan for my UK small business using only the information I provide and clearly labelled assumptions. Do not invent customers, market size, competitors, qualifications, sales, costs, legal requirements or financial figures. If information is missing, ask concise questions before drafting or mark the gap as unknown.
   
   Business: [what the business sells and how it operates]
   Business structure and location: [sole trader, partnership or limited company, and UK location]
   Founder experience and capacity: [relevant experience, available time and skills]
   Target customers: [who they are, where they are and why they would buy]
   Problem solved: [the customer problem]
   Products or services and prices: [current or planned offer and prices in pounds]
   Sales channels: [how customers will find and buy from the business]
   Competitors and evidence: [known competitors, source links and observations]
   Startup assets and funding available: [cash, equipment, premises and funding constraints]
   One-off costs: [items and amounts in pounds]
   Monthly costs: [items and amounts in pounds]
   Expected sales assumptions: [units or customers, price, frequency and evidence]
   Business goals: [goals and target dates]
   Risks or constraints: [regulatory, staffing, supply, cash-flow or other risks]
   
   Produce these sections: executive summary, business description, customer and problem, offer and pricing, market and competitor evidence, marketing and sales plan, operations, people, legal and regulatory questions to confirm, financial assumptions, a monthly cash-flow model for the first 12 months, three clearly labelled scenarios, break-even explanation, risks and mitigations, milestones, and specific next actions.
   
   Show every calculation in a table. Separate facts, assumptions, questions and recommendations. Identify which figures I must verify against invoices, bank records, supplier quotes, GOV.UK guidance or other named sources. Do not give tax or legal conclusions. State plainly that this is not professional advice and identify where an accountant or solicitor should review it. Use UK English and pounds sterling.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.