Accounting Integration Walkthrough

Setup Quickbooks or Xero Integrations, Connect Accounting, Benefits of Setting up Accounting, Automation, Automatic, How to Map Accounting.

Kelvin Hudson avatar
Written by Kelvin Hudson
Updated over a week ago

Quick Topics:

Setting Up Your QuickBooks / Xero Integrations: How to Map Items

Steps to Connect your QuickBooks / Xero Online Account:

  • 1. Go to the right side of the screen on either the assumptions or financials tab and you'll find the word "integrations". Click here to be taken to the next screen.

  • 2. From there, click "connect integrations" and you'll now see this page.

  • 3. Finally, click "Connect" and log in to your QuickBooks / Xero when prompted and allow the integration to connect.

  • 4. You'll now be on the "mapping" screen. This is an identical copy of your QuickBooks and you will be clicking the 3 dot menu located to the right of your QuickBooks line item and "mapping it" to the Forecastr line item where you want the data to sync.

    • This just means that you'll be telling the QuickBooks / Xero line item what it's match in Forecastr is.

    • Each line item that can be mapped will display one of 3 colors at any given time:

      • A WHITE circle next to an item means that it "is NOT mapped"

      • A GREEN checkmark next to an item means it's "SUCCESSFULLY mapped"

      • And a GREY circle next to an item means you've already mapped something related to this item that already accounts for some or all of it's value.

    • You can search in one of two ways once you click "map item". You can either use the dropdown to navigate to the item you want this mapped to OR if you know the name of the Forecastr item you're trying to match it to you can click into the box and just type the name of the Forecastr Line item to save time.


Immediate Benefits of Setting Up Your QuickBooks / Xero Integration

  • After connecting QuickBooks v1 (current integration) the platform will now automatically keep your historical revenue stream, expense, and balance sheet data up to date- only requiring a refresh of the integrations (done from the "Refresh" button on the mapping page) to replace what used to be potentially an hour or hours of work updating each individual line item with manual edits.

  • Because the v1 QuickBooks data doesn't "drive the Forecast" you now only need to update bout 15-20% of the typical metrics you needed to manually override before, namely the following metrics:

    • Customer Counts (Such as number of subscribers)

    • Metrics with Month over Month Growth Rates

    • And balance sheet items which now take a fraction of the time to update as explained by the video.

  • When QuickBooks V2 releases later this year it will take away the need to manually override any of metrics mentioned above and begin to "drive Forecast data" on historical performance.

  • You gain access to variance analysis at the touch of a single button on the financials tab and soon to follow, the assumptions tab.

  • You no longer need to have your accounting solution open to see the values for your chart of accounts- you can now view this data directly within the platform where its the most useful in reference to updating your forecast.


Should I Map in Broad Categories or Specific Line Items?

  • You have options, you can map individual "children" items to the same line item in Forecastr if you'd prefer to leave your financial model a simple playground and capture the details within your chart of accounts.

    • An example of this would be either choosing to map all of your different marketing line items to one Forecastr item or making one for each.

      • Let's say we have 3 items in our chart of accounts- content creation, pr agency, and billboards. If we want, we can either make a line item for each of these in Forecastr so a total of 3 expenses each titled appropriately and then mapped to OR we can map each of those expenses to a single line item in Forecastr called "General Marketing Budget".

      • If we map all 3 items to the same place, the total of all the mapped values will display next to "General Marketing Budget" when we toggle on "actuals".


What if it seems like I can't map an item or that I don't have an object to map it to?

  • You'll need to create an item for it to be mapped to on the assumptions page. This means clicking on "assumptions" at the top of the screen, navigating to the area where the item you're attempting to map belongs, and then adding a new object to that page with the purple action button in the top-right corner of the screen that it will correlate with. Then navigate back to the mapping page by clicking the following:


Need an example of how items could be mapped?

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