Selling, staying, or going employee-owned? With Aha Planner, get instant valuations, compare exit paths, and model what-if scenarios using your real numbers.
"It bridges the gap between learning and doing — empowering advisors to guide EO transitions and giving business owners a path to explore on their own."
What's my business worth? What exit paths are possible? What's financially realistic? Get answers grounded in your real numbers: multi-method valuations, scenario modeling, and side-by-side comparisons.
Get a clear valuation estimate based on your financials, plus insights into what's helping or hurting your value.
See recasted statements, key ratios, and 16-year forecasts — the way investors, lenders, and buyers see your business.
Test how changes in timing, margins, revenue, or financing affect your valuation and seller proceeds.
Identify strengths and gaps. Your dashboard highlights the value drivers and risk factors buyers care about most.
Compare financial tradeoffs beyond price — including net present value (NPV) of seller proceeds across all options.
Multi-method valuation
Buyers, brokers, and bankers each see value through a different lens. Aha Planner runs the four valuation methods that matter, side by side, with every formula visible and every result grounded in your real financials.
What a seller actually takes home. An income-based estimate of what an owner receives from a sale: we project your earning potential, deduct debt, and add the cash held above what the business needs to operate. Where a traditional Broker Opinion of Value (BOV) gives one broker's judgment in a snapshot, Aha Planner returns a multi-method, formula-transparent result that updates as your financials change.
DCF, Capitalization of Earnings and Market Comparable, weighted
The price tag on full ownership, before financing or cash effects. We blend a two-stage Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) projection, the Capitalization of Earnings method and the Market Comparable into the firm's intrinsic enterprise value, at weights your report states and you can change. The DCF projects future unlevered free cash flow discounted at the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC); the Capitalization method anchors the present using normalized historical earnings and a risk-adjusted Capitalization Rate. The two income methods carry the blend by default, and a method weighted at zero is not part of it.
EBITDA multiples
What the market is actually paying for businesses like yours. We apply the median EBITDA multiple of recent private-business sales in your industry, starting with your own state and widening only until enough comparable sales match — or our own EBITDA bands for your industry where too few of them do. Where sales answer, you see both the multiple and the comparable set behind it, so the number stands on a defensible basis at the negotiating table. Aha Planner ships with a natural-language NAICS / SIC finder so you can pick the right industry code from a description, an existing SIC code, or a sector rather than guessing.
Pooled Debt Capacity
What a buyer can actually finance. We calculate the maximum debt your projected cash flows can service at a healthy Debt Service Coverage Ratio (DSCR, typically 1.15x to 1.5x), pooled across 7-, 10-, and 16-year windows. 7 years is the conventional ceiling most buyers and lenders prefer; the longer horizons fit ESOP transitions and other deals where the buyer can hold for an extended breakeven. This is what the cash flow supports on lender financing alone. An employee ownership transition blends that debt with seller financing, so you see both answers side by side.
Beyond valuation
Every Aha Planner report layers exit viability and Employee Ownership viability pre-feasibility on top of the valuation. The check: can your projected cash flows actually finance a sale or Employee Ownership transition at your indicative valuation? You see the call today, plus the capacity gap if you would need to grow the business further before closing at your target price.
Traditional exit planning takes weeks and costs thousands. Aha Planner delivers immediate, data-backed insights — without sacrificing depth.
Whether you're planning your exit or guiding clients through theirs
Explore your exit options with confidence
Navigate your transition with data-driven clarity. Evaluate employee ownership, strategic sales, and other paths using your real financials.
Deliver professional exit analysis
Elevate your practice with comprehensive exit planning tools. Generate professional reports that help clients make informed decisions about their business transitions.
Combine legal expertise with financial clarity
Bridge the gap between legal structures and financial outcomes. Show clients the real-world impact of different ownership transitions with concrete numbers.
Expand your toolkit with EO insights
Add employee ownership to your advisory arsenal. Leverage advanced valuation methods to show clients how ESOPs and other EO structures compare to traditional exits.
Professional-grade exit insights at a fraction of traditional costs
A full planning toolkit to prepare your business for transition.
$1000
per business annuallyUnlock full visibility, generate reports, and grow your business.
$3000
per advisor annuallyAha Planner is an AI-powered exit planning tool that helps you assess your business's current value, explore exit options, and model future scenarios. Connect QuickBooks, upload documents, or manually enter financial data to generate instant reports on valuation, exit strategies, and financial projections—all guided by Zolid AI.
Unlike traditional services or simple calculators, Aha Planner brings everything together in one platform: multiple valuation methods, dynamic scenario modeling, side-by-side comparisons of exit options (including employee ownership), and ongoing AI guidance as your business evolves.
Zolidar gives an advisor one place to work with every business they advise. Each owner has a workspace, where you work through the and together.
Get started with Aha Planner today or book a demo to see the platform in action.
Aha Planner provides indicative valuations using multiple industry-standard methodologies and real market data. While not formal appraisals, these valuations give you reliable benchmarks for decision-making using your financials and industry comparables.
Our approach includes DCF and capitalization methods, market comparable analysis, debt capacity modeling, and automated EO viability checks. The platform delivers personalized insights through scenario modeling and "what-if" tools that show what drives your business value. It's dynamic and editable—perfect for real conversations with clients at any stage of the exit planning process.
Yes. Whether you're not planning to exit soon, operating at a loss, or just starting to think about succession, Aha Planner helps you:
See Aha Planner in action with our free product demo. No sign-up needed.
Aha Planner includes detailed financial analysis, comparing employee ownership against other exit strategies with side-by-side financial projections, debt capacity analysis and more backed by your financial data.
For most ESOPs and EOTs, employees contribute $0 upfront—the company facilitates the purchase using future cash flow. It's essentially a new benefit for employees while providing business owners with a successful exit strategy. Learn more about how this works.
Zolidar doesn’t set up the ESOP, the trust, or the cooperative, and it doesn’t close the sale. That work is for you and your advisors.
Every advisor plan, including Advisor Free, includes a dashboard of those businesses and referral links. Paid advisor plans add free or discounted plans you can offer owners.
To bring an owner in, see how an advisor invites a business owner to Zolidar.
Aha Planner gives advisors a powerful, centralized tool to guide business owners through complex exit decisions. You can easily generate valuations, compare exit options, and model custom scenarios—all tailored to each of your client's financials.
It helps you lead more strategic conversations, backed by clear, data-driven insights. Whether you're preparing for a client meeting or exploring "what if" paths together, Aha Planner saves time, builds trust, and supports better outcomes.
Each business has its own workspace. Your dashboard lists them, and you can work inside each one with the owner.
Add a workspace for an owner from Advisor › Workspaces, or share a referral link. On Advisor Valuation or Advisor Max, you can also pay for an owner’s plan or offer it at a discount. Advisor Free can’t.
See Aha Planner in action with our free product demo. No sign-up needed.
Aha Planner builds your business valuation and long-range projections from a few years of financial data. There are three ways to get that data in. Pick whichever is easiest, and feel free to mix and match.
Connect QuickBooks Online
Connect your QuickBooks Online account once. Aha Planner then imports your Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, and company information automatically. It pre-fills your inputs for you, so there is no manual entry.
Upload your financial statements (PDF)
Upload PDFs of your financial statements, such as your Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, and payroll documents. Aha Planner reads them and pre-fills your inputs. For the most complete picture, upload the last three years. You can review the extracted numbers before they are used, so you stay in control.
Enter it manually
Prefer to type it in? Enter your key financial figures directly into Aha Planner's guided forms. This covers your income statement, balance sheet, and a few operational details, typically for the last three years.
Adjust the assumptions behind your report
However your data gets in, Aha Planner applies a set of assumptions to turn it into a valuation and projections. For example, it decides how to treat owner compensation or surplus cash. You can adjust or override these assumptions. The report stays transparent throughout: it distinguishes the figures you entered, the assumptions you changed, and the defaults Aha Planner applied. That way you always know what is driving the numbers.
Your report generates instantly once your data is in, with no weeks-long wait like traditional services. You can update or override anything later and regenerate the report.
Aha Planner asks for a shorter list of numbers than a full set of financial statements carries. Some lines are folded together, some it works out from what you enter, and a few it never asks for. Here is where each one goes.
Asked for separately, because a valuation has to normalize them:
Folding these in does not cost you accuracy. Aha Planner works capital expenditure out from the change in your net fixed assets plus depreciation, and depreciation cancels out inside free cash flow, so your valuation follows where your net fixed assets are heading rather than how the original cost and the accumulated depreciation split apart. The judgment that split would inform, how old your assets are and how much life they have left, is a human valuator's call and Aha Planner deliberately leaves it to one.
On income tax. Aha Planner never asks you for income tax. It works your taxes out for you from your profit and the state your business is in, and a loss year pays nothing. It uses one flat federal rate and one flat state rate, with no brackets, no loss carryforwards, and no deferred taxes. Your legal structure does not change the calculation, so a pass-through entity is modeled the same way as a C corporation. Capital gains at exit are taxed separately and are not part of this.
What to do if you cannot find a line you expected. Look for it in the fold-in it belongs to above. If it is still missing, it is one Aha Planner works out for you, and entering it would double-count. Reach us at z@zolidar.com if a number you hold does not fit anywhere on the form.
Open any page of your report and click Your inputs (the pencil icon) in the actions menu at the top. That takes you to the guided input forms: business details, income statement, balance sheet, and operations. Change any figure and your report updates instantly. Changing figures needs edit access in your workspace; members with view-only access see the inputs in read-only mode.
There are three ways to refresh your numbers. Pick whichever fits:
Edit the fields directly in the input forms.
Upload corrected statements. Upload new PDFs at any time; the newest upload fills the matching fields and outlines them in green so you can see exactly what changed.
Re-sync QuickBooks. If you connected QuickBooks Online, sync again and the same green-outline update shows what moved.
However your data gets in, the report keeps the figures you entered, the assumptions you changed, and the defaults Aha Planner applied clearly separated, so you always know what is driving the numbers.
Your uploaded documents stay attached to your workspace as the record of where your numbers came from. You can see every document on your workspace's Documents page and open any of them in your browser. There is no self-serve delete today.
Starting over does not require deleting anything:
Upload corrected statements. The newest upload replaces the affected input values and outlines them in green.
Edit the fields directly. Open Your inputs from the actions menu at the top of your report and change any figure.
If you need documents removed from your workspace, reach the team through the Get in touch form at zolidar.com/contact, also linked at the bottom of most storefront pages, and we will help you reset.
Every Zolid AI answer has thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. Tap one to rate the answer; you can add a comment or suggest what a better answer would have looked like. The team reviews this feedback to make Zolid AI better.
For anything beyond a single answer, like a bug, a confusing screen, or a feature request, use the Get in touch form at zolidar.com/contact, also linked at the bottom of most storefront pages.
For a business:
For an advisor:
For an organization, a Zolidar Hub is $12,000 a year.
An advisor on a paid advisor plan can offer a business owner a free or discounted plan. Compare plans on the pricing page.
We take your privacy seriously. Any information you share with us is stored securely and used only to support your experience on Zolidar. We never sell your data, and we won't share it with third parties unless you explicitly give us permission. Your information stays private unless you decide to share it.
When using Zolidar's AI tools, your data remains confidential. Zolidar uses secure APIs from trusted providers like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, who do not store your information or use it to train their models. We never share your data with consumer-facing tools, and our use is fully compliant with their privacy policies. You're in control, and your data is protected.
You can read more in our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. If you have specific questions, you can reach us through our contact form.
Choose Invite team member in your workspace, enter their email, and pick their access. Zolidar emails them an invitation.
Each person holds at most one role in each group. When an advisor invites someone into a client’s workspace that has no Owner yet, Admin Tools starts at Owner.
Yes! You can talk to real people for help. Here's how:
Contact Zolidar
Our team is here to help with technical support, product questions, employee ownership guidance, and exit planning. We can point you in the right direction and help you get started.
Ways to reach us:
We can help with:
Or Connect with Professionals in The Grid
If you want to explore working with advisors on your own, The Grid https://zolidar.com/grid is our community directory of professionals who specialize in employee ownership and business succession planning. You can browse profiles, search by expertise or location, and reach out to professionals directly.
Note: While Zolid AI can answer many questions immediately, it's an AI assistant, not a real person. For personalized guidance or complex situations, we recommend starting with our team—we can help determine the best path forward for your needs.