The argument for funding a project: today's cost, the options, three years of numbers and the ask.
A business case gets read by someone whose job is to find the hole in it. This one asks for $140,000 to add barcode scanning to a warehouse, and shows the working behind every figure. Use it as a pattern when you make yours in a Claude conversation. The company is invented, but the sums add up.
Who it's for
A manager who needs money for a project and has to get it past finance and a leadership team. Send it two or three weeks before the decision meeting, so the hard questions arrive while you can still answer them. Finance reads it with a calculator. Everyone else reads the opening and the risks.
If your company has its own capital request form, fill that in too. The page is the argument and the form is the paperwork.
What a good one contains
- The ask, first. The example opens with what the problem costs, the money requested, the payback and the three-year result. A reader who stops there can still vote.
- Today's cost, built from things you counted. A four-week audit found 720 wrong picks: 36 a day at $46 each, or $414,000 a year.
- Doing nothing, priced. It sits in the table as option A. Finance compares your project with the status quo whether you show it or not.
- A smaller option and a bigger one. Two extra checkers with nothing to buy, or a whole new warehouse system. The recommendation then reads as a choice between named things.
- Costs and savings by year. Cost, saving, net and running total for 2027 to 2029, in a table with bars above it. The first year ends $20,750 down, and the page says so. Savings you can't prove, such as faster picking, are named and left at zero.
- Risks with a figure attached. If the error rate only halves, the three-year net falls to $269,500. Finance can weigh that. It can't weigh "adoption may be slow."
- The decision, with a date. An amount, a deadline, and what waiting costs: about $25,875 a month.
Before finance reads it
Redo every sum from the page as written. Totals must equal their parts, and the summary must match the tables. One wrong figure and the meeting is about your arithmetic.
Say where each input came from: an audit, a payroll rate, a vendor's quote. Then find the assumption the case rests on, here that errors fall to 0.3%, and show what happens if it's wrong.
If a quote changes before the meeting, update the page and say what moved. A total that shifts without a word reads as an error.
How to send it
To named people. It holds internal costs and a request for money. The readers are a handful of colleagues in finance and leadership, so name them.
Every page you publish gets one link that opens in any browser. You choose who can open it: anyone with the link, anyone with the password, or only the people and company domains you name, who sign in with Google or Microsoft. Change the page later and the link stays the same.
