It’s well known that big data is giong to be key in the future of business intelligence, helping people at every level of the organization to make better decisions.  But what about business intelligence before a business is even launched?  What if data could help you determine whether or not a business idea should become a reality at all, and what if data could help in the business planning stage?

Enloop is a startup that’s set out to help people decide on whether or not a business is a good idea, saving people a great deal of time and money in the very early stages of business development.  The service leverages existing business data and financial trends to create standardized business plans with all the necessary reports and language required by banks, underwriters and investors to even consider an initial business idea.  Currently in beta, Enloop has put out an update that further simplifies the initial set up process, putting data to work for prediction purposes.

Enhancements to the Enloop platform include custom planning, so an entreprenuer can decide what level of detail they want for their living business plan.  Giving users options at this stage means Enloop can be used to more quickly answer the very basic question: should I start this business?  From there, Enloop data can be added, removed or modified for more complex analysis, providing more informative results on 1, 2 and 3 year forecasting and powerful planning tools to provide accurate forecasting up to 36 months.

It’s Enloop’s data analysis approach that gives this startup so much potential.  “We started thinking about this in terms of predictive score algorithms that allow people to understand the risk of business on a simple scale: 0-1000,” Enloop founder and CEO Cynthia McCahon explains.

“What if we could create a platform that allowed us to collect data, parse it, pair it with secondary codes and use it as a baseline?  If we could create a platform that shows people in a simple analysis where they’re likely to perform in their industry, that would be a useful utility.”

From there, Enloop can help you improve your business idea, or even help you let go of the idea, which is sometimes the right thing to do.  Decision-making can be an emotional process sometimes, so having data to guide you in one direction or another is a comfort, and it’s one that’s based on predictive analysis that offers insight to the future.  There’s no way of knowing exactly what the future holds, but building on decades of data can offer a historical, current and future perspectives on business performance.

In an era where entrepreneurship is part of our American ethos, and starting a business can help to regain an economic foothold at a national scale, enabling the success of each startup is a personal goal for McCahon.  Real time data analysis is key to Enloop’s offering, becoming an interactive tool for helping entrepreneurs at this crucial stage in the planning process.  And for those without MBAs, having a tool to help them see a realistic outcome for cash flow can tremendously help a business plan take on the strongest characteristics possible.

Growing Enloop’s platform from here will require a continued focus on data collection and analysis, as this will become the heartbeat of Enloop’s interactive capabilities, especially when it comes to running models for analysis in real time.  McCahon also notes how the participation of each user adds to Enloop’s valuable database, helping it to learn and grow as a tool.  Enloop is looking to fix a widespread problem at a very basic level, and putting data to work in order to achieve that goal.