Manual data entry is a reliable way to get started with BusinessSolvency — and for many users it remains the right approach, particularly when historical data is being entered for the first time from printed or PDF financial statements. But for ongoing use, importing directly from your accounting system offers significant advantages.
Three reasons to use the import function
Accuracy — figures imported directly from Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks, Sage, or Reckon exactly match your accounting system. There is no risk of transcription errors, transposed digits, or figures entered in the wrong field.
Speed — a full year's P&L and Balance Sheet can be imported in under two minutes. For organisations monitoring multiple businesses across multiple years, this is a significant time saving.
Consistency — imported data uses the same field classifications as your accounting system, making it easier for your accountant to verify the BusinessSolvency analysis against the source records.
The import function is available from the main menu under Import Data. It accepts CSV files exported from Xero, MYOB, Sage, or Reckon, and Excel XLSX files from QuickBooks or any accounting system that supports Excel export. One file covers one financial year — import each year separately, working from oldest to most recent.
BusinessSolvency Phase 1 import supports the three accounting systems used by the overwhelming majority of Australian businesses.
If your business uses a different accounting system again — such as NetSuite or a bespoke ERP — you can still import data if the system can export to CSV or Excel format. There is no separate "generic" mode to select: the same automatic label recognition applies to any CSV or Excel file, whatever system produced it. Any rows it doesn't recognise are listed clearly in the confirmation message (see Section 6.6) so they can be entered manually instead.
The following steps produce the two CSV files needed to import a full year of financial data into BusinessSolvency from Xero. Your accountant can perform these steps on your behalf if you prefer.
Exporting the Profit & Loss from Xero
- Log into Xero and navigate to
Accountingin the top menu, then selectReports - Under Financial Statements, select
Profit and Loss - Set the date range to your full financial year — for example,
1 July 2023to30 June 2024for the FY2024 year - Click
Updateto generate the report - Click
Exportin the top right corner and selectCSV - Save the file with a clear name — for example
BusinessName_PL_FY2024.csv
Exporting the Balance Sheet from Xero
- Return to
Accounting → Reports - Under Financial Statements, select
Balance Sheet - Set the date to the last day of your financial year — for example
30 June 2024 - Click
Updateto generate the report - Click
Exportand selectCSV - Save as
BusinessName_BS_FY2024.csv - Repeat both exports for each financial year you wish to import — working from oldest to most recent
Exporting the Profit & Loss from MYOB
- Log into MYOB and navigate to
Reportsin the left sidebar - Under Profit & Loss, select
Profit & Loss Statement - Set the financial year date range and click
Run Report - Click
Exportand selectExport to CSV - Save as
BusinessName_PL_FY2024.csv
Exporting the Balance Sheet from MYOB
- Under Balance Sheet, select
Balance Sheet Summary - Set the date to the last day of your financial year
- Click
Run ReportthenExport to CSV - Save as
BusinessName_BS_FY2024.csv - Repeat for each financial year required, oldest first
Once you have your exported files, importing into BusinessSolvency is a short, three-step process — deliberately kept simple so it can be done without any training.
Why CSV and Excel behave differently here
An Excel workbook can hold more than one page inside a single file — a "Profit and Loss" tab, a "Balance Sheet" tab, and a "Cash Flow" tab, each named. BusinessSolvency reads those tab names to know which figures belong to which statement, so one Excel file can genuinely carry all three statements at once.
A CSV file is just one flat list of figures with no tabs and no names attached. When your accounting system exports a Profit and Loss, a Balance Sheet, and a Cash Flow as CSVs, each one comes out as its own separate file — there is nothing inside a CSV to say "this part is the Balance Sheet." That is why CSV imports need to be done one statement at a time, while an Excel workbook does not.
This isn't a limitation BusinessSolvency has chosen — it reflects how the two file formats are built. If you would rather upload one file and be done, export to Excel; if your system only offers CSV, simply upload each statement separately, one after the other.
One of the most common situations BusinessSolvency addresses is the business whose accountant has not prepared a cash flow statement — or has prepared one that is not properly integrated with the P&L and Balance Sheet. This is more common than most business owners realise, particularly for smaller businesses where cash flow statements are not a statutory requirement.
How the Cash Flow Statement is built from an import
When you import a P&L and Balance Sheet, BusinessSolvency's Net Income and Depreciation figures on the Cash Flow Statement are picked up automatically from the imported Income Statement — these two genuinely require no separate entry.
Receivables movement, Inventory movement, and Accounts Payable movement, along with Capital Expenditure, Debt Repayments, Dividends, and Drawings, are business owner-entered fields — they are not calculated automatically from balance sheet movements between years. If your accounting export includes a Cash Flow Statement, these will typically match against it and import directly the same way any other row does; if it doesn't, you'll need to enter them yourself, the same way you would any other missing figure (see below).
The result is an integrated three-statement view — but the accuracy of the Cash Flow Statement specifically depends on these figures being entered, either from your accounting system's own cash flow export or by hand.
Not every row in every export will be recognised. Accounting systems use slightly different wording, and a business with an unusual chart of accounts may have a line item BusinessSolvency has never seen before. This is expected, and it is designed to be fixable by the business owner alone — without waiting for support, wherever in the world you happen to be at the time.
What happens when a row isn't recognised
Nothing is written to your records the moment you upload a file. Instead, BusinessSolvency shows you a review screen listing every row it found a number in — matched and unmatched alike — before anything is saved.
Rows it matched automatically show which BusinessSolvency field they're headed to, so you can check the guess before confirming. Rows it couldn't place are shaded and flagged clearly, with the exact label and figure from your file shown alongside a dropdown of every BusinessSolvency field, grouped by statement, so you can route it yourself. Nothing is saved until you click Confirm on that screen.
The matching itself runs in three passes — an exact label confirmed on a previous import, a curated list of known accounting phrases, and a best-guess fuzzy match for anything else — each shown on the review screen with its own badge so you know how confident BusinessSolvency actually is about each row. See Chapter 6A for the full detail on how that works, along with a handful of import gotchas worth knowing before you rely on it.
This is a deliberate design choice. Rather than silently guessing and hoping the guess was right, BusinessSolvency shows its working and asks you to confirm it — and the fix for anything left over is the same review screen, not a separate tool or a trip back to Chapter 4. A business owner working from a different city, a different state, or a different time zone from their accountant is never stuck waiting on someone else to unblock an import.
The BusinessSolvency import module is being developed in phases. The current Phase 1 capability covers the formats used by the large majority of Australian businesses. Future phases will extend this capability as the platform develops.
For financial statements that exist only as scanned images or printed documents, manual entry using the field guide in Chapter 4 remains the most reliable approach. The accuracy of the solvency analysis depends entirely on the accuracy of the data entered — and manual entry from a clearly printed document is more reliable than optical character recognition from a photograph or scan.
Section 6A.1 explains how the matching engine reads an import file. This is the list it's actually matching against — every field BusinessSolvency recognises, grouped by statement, with the common alternate names in your own chart of accounts that will match it automatically. Sharing this with whoever prepares your export — your accountant, the bookkeeper they supervise, or a business partner — means they can map their own chart of accounts to BusinessSolvency's before they even open the Import screen, rather than working it out from the review screen afterward.
🖨 Print / Save as PDF| BusinessSolvency field | Also matches |
|---|---|
| Trading Revenue / Sales | Income, Sales Revenue, Trading Income |
| Cost of Goods Sold | Cost of Sales, Purchases, Materials |
| Salaries & Wages | Payroll |
| Superannuation | Super Annuation |
| Rent & Occupancy | Lease Expense |
| Fuel | Motor Vehicle — Fuel |
| Insurance | — |
| Professional Fees | Accounting Fees, Legal Fees, Consulting Fees |
| Depreciation | Amortisation |
| Interest Expense | Interest Paid, Bank Charges, Finance Charges |
| Other Overheads | General Expenses |
| BusinessSolvency field | Also matches |
|---|---|
| Cash at Bank | Bank, Cash |
| Trade Debtors | Accounts Receivable |
| GST Receivable | GST Asset |
| Inventory / Stock | — |
| Cashflow Reserve | — |
| Loan Repayment Reserve | Loan Reserve |
| Drawings Reserve | — |
| Property | — |
| Plant and Equipment | Equipment, Fixed Assets |
| Right-of-Use Assets | ROU Asset, Lease Asset |
| Accumulated Depreciation | Less Depreciation |
| BusinessSolvency field | Also matches |
|---|---|
| Accounts Payable | Trade Creditors |
| GST Payable | GST Liability |
| PAYG Withholding Provision | PAYG Withholding Payable |
| Superannuation Provision | Superannuation Payable, Super Payable |
| Tax Provision | — |
| ATO Obligations | Income Tax Payable, Tax Payable |
| Short-term Loans | Overdraft |
| Long Term Debt | Bank Loan, Term Loan, Mortgage |
| Deferred Taxes | — |
| BusinessSolvency field | Also matches |
|---|---|
| Share Capital | Paid Up Capital |
| Contingencies | Contingency Reserve, General Reserve |
| Retained Earnings | Always a calculated balancing figure — see Chapter 4. Any imported value is not used. |
| BusinessSolvency field | Also matches |
|---|---|
| Capital Expenditure | CapEx |
| New Borrowings / Loans | Borrowings |
| Debt Repayment | Loan Repayment, Equipment Finance |
| Owner Drawings | Private Drawings, Owner's Drawings |
| Dividends | — |
| Capital Introduced | Partners’ Capital Introduced, Proceeds from Issue of Shares, Levies, Grants & Appeals, Equity Issued, Equity Issuances |
| Long-term Investments | — |
| Divestitures | — |
| PAYG Provision Funding | — |
| Super Provision Funding | — |
| Tax Provision Funding | — |
| Cashflow Reserve Funding | — |
| Loan Reserve Funding | — |
| Drawings Reserve Funding | — |
| Beginning Cash | Opening Cash |
Not importable by design — the Sustainable Cashflow Formula's own settings
Eight fields exist only inside BusinessSolvency and have no equivalent line in any external accounting system, so they're never import targets: the Contingency Reserve Target (Months of Cover), the Cashflow Reserve and Drawings Reserve Equity % and $ settings, the Cashflow Reserve Target ($), and the Estimated Annual Net Drawings Shortfall. These are the Sustainable Cashflow Formula's own reserve-planning mechanism — set directly on each forecast year's page, not something any chart of accounts could contain.
Subtotals and calculated lines are recognised, not imported
Gross Profit, Net Profit, Total Assets, Total Liabilities, Total Equity, and similar subtotal rows are recognised by the matching engine specifically so they're set aside — BusinessSolvency calculates every one of these itself from the raw fields above, so an imported subtotal is never used even when the row is present in your file. This is deliberate: it's what keeps the Balance Sheet and Cash Flow internally consistent regardless of small differences in how your own chart of accounts is structured.