Getting Started
Overview
Modelopic is a powerful and intuitive financial reporting and projections platform. It enables you to build a compelling forecast of your company's future, generate insightful financial reporting materials, and professionalize your strategic finance operations.
Modeloptic can be either completely self-service, or you can leverage our team to help you build and maintain your financials on your behalf.
Free Trial
If you'd like to try out Modeloptic on your own using your company's own data, we have a free 14-day self-service trial available.
Once you create the connection to your accounting system, Modeloptic will auto-generate your chart of accounts and a basic starting forecast for you.
If you'd like a live walk through from us or have any questions, please feel free to Contact Us any time.
Demo
If you'd instead like to try out Modeloptic using an instance pre-populated with example data, we also have a self-service demo available.
Company & User Account Creation
The first step to getting started in Modeloptic is to Contact Us to choose a plan and have us create an account for your company.
We will also create user accounts for you and your team, and make sure the correct permissions are set on each. See the following section for the available permissions.
User Access & Permissions
Modeloptic allows for several levels of user permissions to be set on a given account:
By making use of these settings, you can ensure that only authorized users are able to make particular changes in your account and that access to sensitive information (like payroll data) is restricted.
New user account creation and changes to permissions must be done by Modeloptic staff, so please contact your account manager if you'd like to make changes.
Implementation
Getting your Modeloptic account set up is typically a very quick process. It can be done in a matter of hours for companies with simple financials, or can take a bit longer for companies with more complex circumstances.
While Modeloptic can be set up completely on your own, most customers opt to have our team lead their implementation to ensure their configuration, forecast, and reporting materials are comprehensive and robust. Once finished, we then hand the reigns over to you.
Implementation includes the following steps:
- Set up your company's chart of accounts within Modeloptic, including your key operating metrics
- Load in your historical financial data (typically via API connection to your accounting system)
- Load in your historical key metric data (either via Excel upload or input directly)
- Build the first version of your model, typically over a few iterations
- Customize your reporting setup to ensure it's capturing the key nuances of your business
- Hold an onboarding training session to bring your team up to speed
All of these steps are covered in detail in this guide.
Signing In
Once your account has been created, you can log in here, or by going to the "Login" link on Modeloptic's main page.
Navigation
Once logged in, you will start on the Financial Detail page. Using the menu on the left, you will see the following options:
Hovering over the "Projections", "Performance", and "Historicals" options will show you all available navigation options, including the following:
- Financial Detail: The primary page for creating and modifying your forecast, as well as where you can view your full financial statements.
- Personnel: A specialized forecasting page for projecting expenses related to staff.
- Customers: A specialized forecasting page for projecting revenue by individual customer or customer cohort. Note that to enable access to this page, you must have the "Enable Customers Module" option checked on the Configuration page.
- Projection Sets: Create and manage different versions of your model.
- Dashboard: View and customize graphs, data tables, and more to get insights into company performance. This page is structured in a free-form format, intended for use within the browser.
- Reports: Similar to the Dashboard page, but structured into pages intended for creating deliverable reports in PDF format.
- Variance Analysis: A powerful tool for measuring actual performance versus prior forecasts (or actuals vs prior actuals).
- Historical Data: Refresh your historical financials within Modeloptic (either from your accounting system or via Excel) and update the mapping between the chart of accounts in your accounting system anhd the chart of accounts in Modeloptic.
- Key Metrics: Define and edit key operating metrics for use as model drivers and for summary display, and edit historical data for those metrics.
- Configuration: Edit key company settings, including the start date for historical data, end date for the projected period, connection to your accounting system, and your chart of accounts.
- Switch Company: If you have access to multiple companies within Modeloptic, you can switch between them here.
- User Account: See basic information about your user account and change your password when desired.
Views
Modeloptic will show a monthly view by default, but quarterly and annual views are available as well on several pages:
As you can see in the image above from the Financial Detail page, there is a "Condensed View" option available to provide a higher level, more condensed look at your financials.
In the monthly and quarterly views, you can use the plus/minus icons above the year totals to collapse the component periods of a given year.
The expanded view looks like this:
And the collapsed view looks like this:
Company Configuration
Most of your company's configuration will be set on the Configuration page:
There, you will see options for setting:
- Your Company's fiscal year
- Which historical and projected years to include
- Historical data connection options
- Your Company's chart of accounts within Modeloptic
- Additional configuration options
Each of these are covered in more depth in the Company Configuration section of this guide.
Loading in Historical Data
The next step will be to load in your company's historical financials and operating metrics.
If you use QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, or Sage Intacct for your accounting system, you can create a direct connection to pull data from them into Modeloptic. Otherwise, data can also be loaded in via Excel upload. Setting up your accounting connection is done and the Configuration page, and you'll then refresh your data within Modeloptic on the Historical Data page thereafter.
All of this is covered in detail in the Historical Data section of this guide.
Creating Your First Model
Once your company configuration has been set and historical data has been loaded in, navigate to the Projection Sets page. Create your first blank projection set using the "+ Add New Blank Projection Set" button in the bottom left, give it a name, and hit the "Save Projection Sets" button in the top right.
From there, most of your projection logic will live on the Financial Detail page. You'll also use the Personnel page for forecasting staff-related expenses. For some companies, forecasting revenue by individual customer (or customer cohort) will make sense, which can be done on the Customers page.
On the top right of each of these pages, you'll notice an error icon that looks like this:
This indicates that there is a validation error in your model. This isn't surprising if you have a newly created blank model, as the validator will be telling you that you need to set forecast options on all of your line items. Clicking on it will show you the errors:
As you go through each line and begin setting forecast options, these errors will go away. Detailed instructions on how to create projections on each of these pages can be found in the Forecasting, Personnel, and Customers sections of this guide.
Getting Assistance
If you ever want help with anything related to Modeloptic, or corporate finance in general for that matter, our team is always here to help.
Technical support, including walkthroughs of Modeloptic functionality, is always free for customers. If you'd like more intensive help, we offer consulting services, which you can learn more about on our pricing page.