An E-2 filing turns on a small number of specific questions, and the plan is where several of them are answered.
Not a bank balance. Committed, irrevocable, and spent or contractually obligated. The sources and uses table has to show where the money came from and exactly what it buys — equipment, build-out, inventory, working capital — with the amounts adding up to the total.
This is the part that fails most often. A business that produces only enough income to support the investor and their family is marginal, and marginal is a refusal. The projections have to show income above that threshold, or a capacity to hire, within roughly five years.
That is an arithmetic question, and arithmetic is what a deterministic model is for. Ours produces the profit and loss, the monthly cash flow, the balance sheet and the staffing schedule from one consistent set of assumptions, each of them bounded by published industry ranges.
The E-2 / EB-5 version of the plan adds a five-year staffing plan with headcount by role and by year, priced at the real local wage from Bureau of Labor Statistics data for your county — not a national average.
This is not legal advice, and it does not replace an immigration attorney. Attorneys generally want the plan to exist before they file; several of the numbers in it are ones only a model can produce.