Chapter 6 covers the everyday path — export from your accounting system, upload, confirm. This chapter is the deeper reference: what happens behind that review screen, and the handful of things every one of BusinessSolvency's own demo businesses has hit at least once while being built out.
Every row from your file is matched against BusinessSolvency's chart of accounts in three passes, tried in order. The first pass that finds something wins; anything none of the three recognise is left for you to choose manually on the review screen.
remembered
An exact label confirmed before
If any business owner, on any business, has previously confirmed exactly this label maps to a particular field, it matches instantly. This is the pass that gets smarter over time — the more often a label is confirmed, the more reliable BusinessSolvency treats it.
keyword
A known phrase, hand-curated
A built-in list of common accounting phrases — "Cost of Goods", "Superannuation", "Owner Drawings", "Contingency Reserve" or "General Reserve", and many more — matched with full confidence. This is the pass doing most of the work on a first-time import.
fuzzy
A best-guess suggestion
For anything the first two passes miss, BusinessSolvency scores the label against everything it knows and offers its closest guess — pre-filled on the review screen, but visibly flagged as a suggestion rather than a certainty. These are the rows most worth a second look before confirming.
Why this matters more than it might seem
Every business has its own chart of accounts, and an accountant will often restructure one for their own reporting reasons — splitting a cost out for profitability analysis on a particular machine, product line, or team, for instance. The remembered pass means that decision only has to be made once, by one business owner, on one business — every business afterwards with the same unusual label benefits from it automatically.
These aren't hypothetical edge cases — every one of them was found while building out BusinessSolvency's own demo businesses, and each one is easy to miss if you don't already know it's there.
① Capital Expenditure must be entered as a positive number
The underlying calculation applies its own minus sign. A negative CapEx figure gets flipped into a cash inflow instead of an outflow — silently, with no error — and the Cash Flow statement will look like it's short by roughly double the CapEx amount every year it's wrong.
② Historical years automatically add Fuel on top of "Cost of Goods Sold"
There's no Manual/Auto toggle for historical years the way there is for forecast years — Fuel is always folded in. The figure entered in "Cost of Goods Sold" for a historical year must be the raw materials cost only, never a total that already includes Fuel — otherwise Fuel gets counted twice, and profit comes out understated every year it's wrong.
③ Forecast years need three settings confirmed manually before importing
These live on each forecast year's own data-entry page, not in the spreadsheet import itself: tick Manual on Cost of Goods Sold; tick Manual on Wage-to-COGS and set the $ amount to 0 (unless a genuine COGS split is intended); and set Contingency % to 0 (unless a genuine overhead loading is intended). Skipping these lets BusinessSolvency auto-calculate COGS from a stored percentage, split part of Wages into COGS, and add an overhead loading — all silently, using whatever settings happen to already be stored for that year.
④ Wages doesn't reliably import into a forecast year that already has a wages figure stored
There are two wages fields internally — an editable base and a calculated display figure — and the import writes to the display figure, which is ignored whenever the base already holds a non-zero value from earlier work. If a Wages import doesn't seem to take, check the actual number directly on the forecast year's page and correct it by hand if needed.
⑤ The "Wages and Payroll" row packs three boxes into one line
The full wages figure, a %-to-COGS split, and a $ override sit side by side. The full figure always goes in the first box — the other two stay at 0 unless a genuine COGS split is intended. Typing the full figure into the wrong box shows up as a negative "Wages shown on P&L" line and an implausibly high Net Income.
Two checks catch almost every real problem, on any business, in under a minute:
⚖️ Does the Balance Sheet balance?
Total Assets minus Total Liabilities should equal Total Equity, every year, to within a dollar of rounding. If it's out by more than that, something didn't import as expected.
🔁 Does the Cash Flow actually reconcile?
Beginning Cash plus every flow line should equal the reported Ending Cash. A gap suspiciously close to double one specific line's value almost always means that line's sign is backwards (see Gotcha ①).
A balancing Balance Sheet is not proof the numbers are right
BusinessSolvency's Retained Earnings figure is a balancing plug — the Balance Sheet is designed to balance regardless of input values, so it will "balance" even around a genuinely wrong number elsewhere. The Cash Flow reconciliation is the sharper test, because nothing forces it to close if an input is wrong.
Export to Excel or CSV works from the business's page, with the same Historical/Forecast year selection as Import. BusinessSolvency's own Excel export includes a year-header row, which is what allows a multi-year file to be re-imported into another business in one pass — handy for transferring a template business's structure into a new one.
Whenever a file is going to be re-imported later — into the same business, a different one, or after a round of corrections — it's worth running the two checks in Section 6A.3 on the export before treating it as a clean baseline. Catching a problem in the export is far easier than tracing it back after it's been re-imported and compounded across several years.
“A wrong figure is worse than no figure, because it gives false comfort. Check every import before you trust what it tells you.”