Vertical Project Finance Spreadsheet Layout with an Excel Template and Guideline

Description
Importance of having a structured financial model:
Having a structured financial model means to apply a set of rules when building the model and apply them consistently throughout the financial model.

The key words are Rules and Consistency.

That is why it is important to spend some time on figuring out the design of your spreadsheets. I talk about project finance spreadsheet design in more details in my online course.

Why is it important to have rules and structure in a project finance model?

- make your models to be user friendly and easy to understand.
- easier to maintain
- less prone to errors

While sticking to best practice guidelines and rules, you can give yourself creative freedom to design your financial model the way it suits you but
your goal should remain to create easy navigation for users meaning users to the information they’re seeking in the fewest clicks possible.

In this guide, I want to show you an alternative way of designing your project finance models and compare the typical horizontal worksheet design with a vertical design layout.

To compare the two model structures and design, check the accompanied Excel template. It contains 29 worksheets, 12 worksheets are representing modules of a horizontal model and the remaining worksheets showing same calculations and results but in a vertical design layout.

It is a fairly simple financial model and the aim is to compare the vertical and horizontal spreadsheet layouts.