Thanks for signing up for our free trial! Since you'll be uploading your historical financials via Excel, this guide will walk you through how to do that, as well as how to set up your Modeloptic chart of accounts and build out an initial version of your forecast.

First navigate to the Configuration page. You can modify your company's start and end years here if you'd like:

Make sure that the First Historical Calendar Year that you select here corresponds to the first year of data in the Excel file(s) containing your financials that you'll be uploading. You can import as much history as you'd like, but we recommend importing the past 2-3 years as a starting point.

Next, you'll need to download your financials with monthly detail into Excel format from your accounting system. You'll need your income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows.

The data in the file you're uploading should look something like this:

All data should be on one tab per financial statement, there should be one column for each month of data, each month of data should be in consecutive columns within each year, and the most recent period should be on the right.

To upload your data, navigate to the Historical Data page. Make sure your Latest Historical Period is set to the most recent period for which you'd like to load in data:

Click into the "Financial Statements" Data Connection, and you should see a section that looks like this:

Before uploading each file, set the import options to correspond with the file that you're uploading. The options to set here are as follows:

• Sheet Name: The name of the sheet in the file you're uploading that should be imported for the given financial statement.
• Label Column Letter: The letter of the column that contains the labels for each line item.
• Data Start Column Letter: The letter of the column where the numerical data begins. This should be the column that corresponds to the first fiscal month in the First Historical Calendar Year that has been set on the Configuration page.
• Row Start Number: The row number where you would like the import to begin (you'll presumably want to exclude header rows).
• Expenses Given as Positives?: By convention, Modeloptic displays expenses as negative numbers. If the expenses shown in the file you're uploading are positive, check this box (only applicable for the income statement).
• Expenses Row Start Number: The row on which the expenses begin (only applicable for the income statement). If you've checked the "Expenses Given as Positives?" box, values from this line forward will have their signs flipped.
• Year Total Columns?: Check this box if you have columns interspersed within your monthly data columns that sum up the months in a given year.
• Col Spaces Between Years: Indicate the number of blank columns that appear between each year of data (enter 0 if there are no such columns).

Once you upload a file, you should see a success message. After loading in data for all three financial statements, you're ready to move on to the next step, which is to create a first draft of your chart of accounts within Modeloptic.

There are two different charts of accounts that you'll be working with: The one that's defined within your accounting system (which presumably aligns with the chart of accounts shown in the Excel files you uploaded), and the one that's defined within Modeloptic.

Companies will often have a higher level chart of accounts for the sake of forecasting and reporting versus a lower level chart of accounts within their accounting system. For example, in your accounting system, you might have lines for "Taxis", "Flights", and "Hotels", but in Modeloptic you might only want a single "Travel" line.

You can build out your Modeloptic chart of accounts on the Configuration page:

For more detail on how to build out your chart of accounts, including how to create linkages between the three financial statements, see the Chart of Accounts section of the documentation.

Once you've uploaded your historical financials and created a first draft of your chart of accounts in Modeloptic, the next step is to create the mapping between the line items present in your Excel files (which presumably align with your accounting system's chart of accounts) and your chart of accounts within Modeloptic.

You can do that on the Historical Data page, within the Schema Mapping section:

Once you've finished mapping all of your line items, click the "Save & Generate Data" button:

For more detail on anything described in this section, see the Schema Mapping section of the documentation.

You're now ready to build out your forecast. Modeloptic can create a starting forecast for you that will set some very basic forecast options for each of your accounts.

To do that, navigate to the Projection Sets page:

Projection sets are how different versions of your model are organized. You can think of these as different versions of an Excel file. They typically contain forecast logic as of a given point in time, or present different scenarios.

In the bottom right, click the button that says "+ Create New Projection Set with Basic Starting Options". You should then see the new projection set created for you. This projection set will contain very basic logic for you to use as a starting point, like forecasting revenue based on year-over-year growth rates, forecasting operating expenses and a percentage of revenue, and so on.

After you have your starting projection set created, you can now tailor it to capture the unique dynamics of your company.

Your forecast logic lives on the Model page. Clicking into any line item will open up the forecast logic contained underneath it:

Each line item can be forecast either via built-in options (like % of revenue or trailing average) or via custom logic.

For an overview of the built-in options, see the Basic Forecasting guide.

For an overview of forecasting with custom logic, see the Advanced Forecasting guide.

One of the core concepts underpinning how Modeloptic (and how financial modeling in general) works is the idea of a table. Modeloptic gives you powerful tools for building, managing, and composing these tables.

To navigate between the tables in your model, you can use the Table Navigation screen, which can be accessed by clicking the name of the active table in the top left:

That will open up the Table Navigation screen, which looks like this:

If you click on "Edit Tables" in the bottom left of this screen, you'll be able to add new tables, delete existing tables, and reorganize your table layout.

Modeloptic allows you to use a variety of table types to construct your model. The simplest is a Free-Form table, which allows you to add whatever rows you want, and link them together however you want (much like you would in Excel):

If you're forecasting a collection of similar items (like employees, customers, product SKUs, etc), Modeloptic's more advanced table types are very powerful for forecasting these collections and managing the complexity they involve, and let's you operate on them as a group instead of as individual lines.

For more detail, see the Forecasting with Tables section of the documentation.

For a more detailed example of how powerful these tables can be, see our walkthrough here.

Forecasting staff-related expenses can using a collection of pre-set tables that Modeloptic creates for you:

After generating your personnel tables with the desired settings, you can then populate the tables with your own staff list and hiring plan, which will look something like this:

See the Personnel Presets section of the documentation for more detail.

There is a lot more to know, but this should be enough to get you started!

As a reminder, building out an entire company forecast is an intensive task. This trial is just intended to give you a taste of what Modeloptic is capable of to help you make a decision if it will fit your needs.

If you'd like to learn more about how Modeloptic works, feel free to take a look through our documentation.

If you have any questions for us, please feel free to contact us. We'd love to hear from you!