Rules Flow for Accounting Data

The main goal of the Rules is to map your QuickBooks/Sage Categories to SaaSGrid Categories. Accurate mapping will enable SaaSGrid to correctly calculate costs and other analyses.

To jump between the two steps, you can click on the blue lines at the top of the screen. 

Rules Step 1/2:

Expenses

The first step in Integration setup is to map your QuickBooks/Sage expense categories from your P&L to SaaSGrid Cost Categories. 

Your expense categories and their classes are brought as-is from QuickBooks/Sage to SaaSGrid. 

Our four Cost Categories are:

• Cost of Goods Sold (COGS): COGS are the costs directly associated with operating the product. For pure SaaS companies this typically consists of web hosting, purchased data necessary for the product to run, and the cost of the customer support team. COGS is used for calculating gross margins.
  • For more detail on what to include in COGS, see our blog.
• Sales & Marketing (S&M): All the costs associated with go-to-market efforts, including salaries for marketers and sellers, commissions, and paid marketing campaigns. S&M Expenses are used for calculating CAC.
• Research & Development (R&D): All costs associated with the product, design, and engineering teams, including salaries.
• General & Administrative (G&A): A catch-all for all remaining operating costs.

You can also set a QuickBooks/Sage expense to be ignored in calculations, aka ‘Excluded.’

There are settings above the table around calibrating the table view. You can also group your expenses by 5 QuickBooks categories.

• Class: Classes are assigned to transactions to track account balances by department, business office or location, separate properties you own, or any other meaningful breakdown of your business
• Vendor: People or companies that you owe money to or subcontractors that work for you
• Location: A physical location that is connected to your operations or expenses
• Product: What you sell to a Customer
• Account Type: Determines which financial report QuickBooks adds each account’s data to. The broadest sections are Assets, Liabilities, Income, and Expenses. You can read more about Account Types here.

If you choose multiple Groupings to organize your line items, the table will be sectioned by the first Grouping selected, then within the first Grouping, the next Grouping will be applied. SaaSGrid automatically groups expenses by Class.

If you have a parent QuickBooks/Sage category, its SaaSGrid category will automatically apply for all line items nested under it. You can always manually change the Cost Category for any line item.

You must select ‘Save and Next’ before moving onto the next Step.

Rules Step 2/2:

Cash

The second step in QuickBooks/Sage setup is to map your cash balance from your balance sheet to SaaSGrid Categories. For Cash, there are 3 Categories.

• Ending Cash Balance: Your company’s cash balance as of the end of each month.
• Cash From Financing: Cash you receive from fundraising that is excluded from your Burn calculations.
• Excluded: For any line items you wish to exclude from calculations around cash.

This step works exactly like Step 1, where you can select multiple Groupings and any line items underneath will automatically reflect the Category for the main line item they are under.

Updating Rules:

After completing the Rules for a QuickBooks /Sage set-up, you can always come back at any time to change a setting via your Data Source Detail Page. You can reach a Data Source Detail Page via the Data Sources section, or under the Data Sources in a Workspace.