Upload Your Books As They Are: How the Import Reads Them

Short Answer: Export your profit and loss from QuickBooks or Xero as a spreadsheet file and upload it without reformatting. Up to three .csv, .xlsx or .xls files, 5 MB each, are read as they are: every row is sorted into revenue, direct costs, operating expenses or your own pay, anything unclear becomes a short question, and you review the whole result before a single number is saved.

Most planning tools ask for their own format first. You map your accounts to their categories, fix the headers, delete the subtotals, then upload. For an owner who does the finances at night, that setup is where planning usually stops. We start from the opposite end: the files you already have are the input, and the sorting is our job.

Why Start From the Files You Already Keep?

Your accounting software already holds a year of decisions: what you charged, what the crew cost, what you spent on ads. The export is messy because real books are messy. Account names are whatever your bookkeeper typed in 2021. Some rows are subtotals. A few rows mix two things.

A finance consultant doesn't ask you to clean that up before the first meeting. They read the export, ask about the three lines that don't make sense, and get to work. The import follows the same order.

What Happens After You Upload?

The steps, in the order they run:

1. You pick a time window. The default is the most recent 12 months. You can also choose the most recent 3 or 6 months, everything in the files, or a custom range.
2. The files are read in the background. It takes about 15 minutes. You can close the page; a notice at the bottom of the screen says when the draft is ready, and an email follows if you weren't watching.
3. Unclear rows become questions. If a row could belong in two places, you get a few questions first, for up to three rounds. You can skip the rest and keep the best guess.
4. You review what was found. Revenue streams, direct costs, operating expenses, your own pay, the rows that were left out and why, and how each file was read.
5. Nothing is saved until you confirm. If the draft is wrong, you can ask for it to be reworked (up to twice per draft) without using up an import.

A Worked Example: A Landscaping Company's Export

Take a hypothetical landscaping company, Greenline Landscaping: one owner, a crew of four, two trucks, about $520,000 a year in revenue. Here is a simplified version of the owner's 12-month export and where each row belongs:

The first seven rows are routine. The last two are where a careless read goes wrong.

Owner draws. In a single-member LLC a draw is the owner taking profit home. Count it as an expense and Greenline's profit before owner pay, $114,000, shrinks by whatever the owner took, and every margin after it looks worse than it is.

Loan payments. Many owners book the whole truck payment to one account. The interest is an expense. The principal, $1,500 a month at Greenline, pays down the loan and belongs nowhere on the profit and loss. Left in, it would overstate costs by $18,000 a year.

Rows like these are why the import asks before it guesses silently, and why the review page lists every row it left out. If you can see what was excluded, you can catch the one that shouldn't have been.

Why Does the Time Window Matter So Much?

For a steady business, three months and twelve months tell roughly the same story. For a seasonal one they don't. Greenline bills $48,000 to $70,000 a month from April to October and about $18,400 a month from November to March. Look at what different windows suggest if you treat them as a typical stretch and scale them to a year:

A summer window makes the business look 60% bigger than it is. A winter window makes it look less than half its size. Neither is wrong about those months, but neither describes the year. That is why the default is the most recent 12 months, and why you can change the window and rebuild the draft for free on the review page. Pick a shorter window only when the business changed recently, such as a new service line or a price increase, and the older months no longer describe it.

What to Look For on the Review Page

• Revenue within a few percent of your tax return or year-end report. If the draft shows $498,000 and your books say $520,000, a revenue row was left out or counted as something else. Check the left-out rows first.
• Gross margin in a range you recognize. Greenline's is about 36%. If the draft shows 55%, crew wages probably landed in operating expenses instead of direct costs.
• Your own pay separated from the business's costs. Draws counted as expenses are the most common reason a profitable business looks like it barely breaks even.

What a Finance Consultant Would Do Next

With Greenline's numbers sorted, a consultant would move to the questions the export can't answer alone: which of the three revenue streams carries the business, whether the $42 direct cost on a $55 mowing visit leaves enough room, and how the winter months get funded. The clean read is the starting point for that work.

That analysis is what Occam's Model runs on the files you upload: it reads them as they are, asks about what's unclear, shows you everything before saving it, and then builds the view from revenue down to cash on your own numbers. When you need extra help, an expert can review it with you.

Common Questions

Can I import straight from QuickBooks or Xero?
Not through a live connection. You export a report as a .csv, .xlsx or .xls file and upload it. Up to three files at a time, 5 MB each.

Do I need to clean up my books before importing?
No. Upload the export as it is. Unclear rows turn into questions, and the review page shows how every row was read before anything is saved.

What happens to numbers I already entered?
Confirming an import replaces your revenue, direct costs and operating expenses with what the import found. Review the draft first; nothing changes until you confirm.

How often can I import?
Once a month, plus a retry if an import goes wrong. Reworking a draft you already have doesn't count against that.