How to test executive summary software before you use it

This is a test for executive summaries software, not a ranking. It works on whatever product you are considering, which matters because product line-ups and prices change faster than this page will be read, and most of the rankings you will find are paid placements.

The category is also smaller than the marketing suggests. A summary is one page of argument drawn from a document you already have. Very little software makes that easier, and some of it makes the page worse in a specific, expensive way.

What to take away

What is actually being sold

The slots any of them has to fill are the same, and they are listed in our executive summary template.

Find out about the portal first, because it can settle the rest of the decision. If your reader collects the summary as a form with a character count per field, your job is to write to those fields and no authoring tool will change that.

The requirement that decides it

A tool may not originate a number.

Every figure on this page is a statement to a lender, an investor, or a grant reviewer. You are accountable for it whether you typed it or accepted a suggestion.

A tool that fills in a growth rate, tidies a revenue figure, or writes about reaching profitability because that sentence is common in the material it learned from is making a claim in your name. You cannot defend it.

So the first question is whether it can be stopped from doing that. Some tools only ever reflect back values you entered. Others cannot be constrained, and those are for structure, never for sentences.

Test it on a plan you have already checked

Take a finished plan whose numbers you know are right, with the model from our financial projections guide open beside you, run the tool over it, and look for four things.

Contradictions. Compare every figure in the output against the model. A figure that is not in the model, or is in it differently, shows you what the tool does when an input is missing. One is enough to rule it out for drafting.

Silent rounding. Watch for a number close to yours but tidier. Tidier is a decision somebody made, and your reader has both documents.

Omissions. Check whether the risk and the ask survived. Most drafting tools drop them, because the writing they learned from is promotional and neither appears in promotional writing.

Voice. Read it aloud. If it could open any plan in any industry, it will read that way to someone who sees plans all week.

A tool that shows any of the four on a plan you know is right will do the same on a plan you have not checked, where you will not catch it.

The mechanical requirements

The broader questions to put to any planning vendor, including exports, billing and what happens to your files when you stop paying, are set out in our guide to plan fundamentals software and apply here unchanged.

Confidentiality is a real question on this page

The summary holds the whole argument in one place: what you sell, to whom, what it costs, what you are asking for and from whom. It is the most sensitive page in the plan precisely because it is the most portable.

Before pasting anywhere, get three answers in writing. The Federal Trade Commission's small business cybersecurity guidance includes questions to ask your vendors about their own cybersecurity practices, and a summary tool is one of those vendors.

Where is the content stored? Is it used to train or improve the service? How do you delete it, and how do you confirm deletion happened? If any of those is hard to get, use a plain document and keep the file yourself.

What no tool does

It does not know what you are asking for or which risk you take seriously. It does not know which of your facts is the strongest, since that is a judgment about one specific reader.

It cannot tell you a slot is empty because the underlying work has not been done. That is the usual reason a summary is weak.

Those are the parts that decide the outcome and they are all done with a pen. Our executive summaries guide covers what belongs on the page. Software only decides how the typing happens.

Common questions

Is the summary module in a plan suite worth paying for?

Only if you are already using that suite's financial model, in which case the value is that the figures come from one place. Buying a suite for the summary alone is buying a word processor with prompts attached.

Should I let a tool rewrite the page to sound more professional?

Look closely at what the rewrite removed. Smoothing passes tend to strip specifics, because specific facts are irregular and irregular text scores badly. A plainer page carrying your numbers beats a polished one that could be about anybody.

What about tools that score a summary or predict funding success?

There is nothing there to predict from. Outcomes turn on the business, the reader's own criteria, and the credit file. A score derived from text properties is measuring the text.

Can I do this with free tools?

Yes. A document, a spreadsheet holding the model, and one person who reads plans for a living covers the entire job. A Small Business Development Center (SBDC), part of the SBA's network that provides free business consulting, will go through a draft with you at no charge, which is worth more than any subscription in this category.