QBO App First Look: Dryrun

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For years, even though a majority of QuickBooks users didn’t know about it, we’ve had something called the ‘Cash-flow projector’ (CFP) in QuickBooks Desktop. This tool was extremely complicated, but worked ‘OK’ if you wanted to spend time tinkering and tweaking with it long enough to get meaningful projections. 

QuickBooks Online doesn’t have ‘cash-flow projector’ but there is an App that will give QBO users forward-looking cash-flow and sales scenarios to drive their business growth with far greater ease than CFP ever could.

Dryrun makes cash-flow forecasting painless with their QuickBooks Online integration. Simply import your data into Dryrun and sit back and watch it forecast your cash-flow.  Dryrun imports your bills and invoices looking specifically at the due dates, payment history and payment dates.  It also brings in your expenses and purchases along with your bank balances over time. But let me mention here, the more information you bring into Dryrun from QBO, the more accurate your projections and what-if scenarios will be.

Integrating with QBO

It’s so easy to integrate your QBO data into each scenario for maximum flexibility. With one click you can refresh your data between QBO and Dryrun so you can see what you want, when and how you want it, in order to make sound business decisions.  The above image provided by Dryrun actually has an earlier version of the QuickBooks import options, below is the current window for one of my own companies.  You can see that there are more information import options now available.

Cash-flow Analysis

Evaluating your cash-flow is more than simply adding up the total of invoices due on various dates as the income you are likely to take-in. It’s also more than looking at the due dates of your payables, and trying to subtract inflow from outflow.  It takes a reliable analysis of the historical trends.

Just like you sometimes have cash shortages that can mean you fall behind in paying your own vendors on time, so do your customers.  That means you, as one of their vendors may not get that payment you were expecting when their invoice comes due.  It’s not always easy to project receivables without a crystal ball, but reliance upon history and trends goes a long way in making cash-flow analysis more accurate.

Dryruns’ due date tracking helps in the analysis and projection process and also gives an extra level of visibility within the reported data since indicators are used to flag current, future and overdue transactions. The program’s ‘bump overdue items’ feature allows you to keep overdue items in payables and receivables reflected in today’s date and data; by default, this feature is turned-off but can be turned-on within the program’s Settings.

Dryrun is built around powerful scenario technology to offer you sophisticted cash-flow analysis and planning, which can then be compare alongside your nuts-n-bolts Actual data. But your not limited to a single scenario, you can construct as many different simulations as you wish, then Dryrun makes it easy to compare all of your scenarios to determine which ‘what-if’ situation is most likely the most advantageous path to take for business success.

Sales Forecasting

Invoiced revenues are not the only thing that drives business income because sales are your lifeblood.  Unfortunately, QuickBooks Online doesn’t offer Sales Orders so there really isn’t a way to equate deals in your sales pipeline with future revenues.  But knowing when sales will close is essential to helping you accurately predict your cash-flow, adjust your capacity and get a true measure of where your business is heading.

Dryrun allows you to enter those ‘sales in the works’ manually, or import your deals from Pipedrive1. You can then customize Dryrun settings within any of your scenarios and see how these future sales will impact your revenues and cash-flow.

Better Budgeting

You will build better budgets with Dryrun. Budgets are the foundation of your business finances providing you with the information you need to know about how much revenue you need to operate, and how much capital you need to grow.  While QuickBooks Online gives you some basic budgeting functionality, it lacks the sophistication needed by a growing and changing business. Currently, Dryrun ignores any budget(s) you have constructed in QBO, that data is not imported2. 

Dryrun budgets allow you to pick from a variety of historical budget building models and auto-repeat options. They also give you date flexibility such as period end dates, fiscal year dates, or even infinite run-out projections.  You can easily make changes as your business expands and changes so you can clearly see the affects of the various cash-flow projections against your budgeted assumptions.

Expand Your Trusted Advisor Role

As Accountants, Business Consultants and ProAdvisors, your clients need your advice about their cash-flows and where their business is going.  That means you need tools that give you the edge in providing ‘trusted advisor’ services to your clients.  Dryrun gives you a simple, highly visual, platform that allows you to easily share the information your clients need to not only stay on top of the day-to-day, but to look beyond and see the future in terms of their business operations. 

For those clients who simply ignore the numbers you spout, the visuals will convince them because they can easily see exactly what you are telling them, and as they say, “one picture is worth a thousand words.”

Getting Started with Dryrun

It’s easy to sign-up for a 30-day free trial of Dryrun, then simply connect to your QBO data, configure what information you want to import, and then perform the initial sync.  It took me less than 5-minutes to do all this, and that included watching the 2-minute video tutorial on the process. 

Dryrun will require a little effort on your part, it’s not all just one push of the button, but they offer multiple video tutorials that are each just a few minutes in length. They also have a 7-part recorded webinar series covering everything from their product overview, to getting started, integrating with other Apps, and stepping you through your first forecast. 

There are numerous support articles including some short use cases that are step-by-step, and well-illustrated. In fact, a couple had animated illustrations, or embedded videos that take you through the steps.  I found the one titled, “Use Case: Cash Flow + Sales Forecast” especially beneficial as I first worked my way thru Dryrun.

Dryrun offers on-line chat support within the product, so it’s not all about the product from a sales standpoint, as with many other Apps offering on-line chat.

I rarely quote costs in these App First Look articles, but Dryrun is within the average cost of data analysis Apps that are similar. In fact, it’s below the entry cost for Fathom and Float which are two other common forecasting tools that work with QuickBooks Online. 

Conclusion

Many years ago, I served as Technical Editor on a textbook that included the use of the QuickBooks Cash-flow Projector within the content.  It took dozens of pages to describe the methodology and technique behind that tool. I suspect the complexity of CFP is one reason it has never been well used. 

In contrast, I found Dryrun easy to configure, easy to use, and easy to comprehend. For many small business owners, and trusted advisors, this will be a great tool for understanding not only where their business is going, but how it is getting there.

Footnotes & Disclosures:

1 – Pipedrive is a sales information management tool providing CRM functionality, follow-through, and sales/deal organization and tracking. It integrates directly with Dryrun, and communicates with QuickBooks Online only via Zapier integrations.

2 – QBO budget information is not accessible via Intuit’s QBO Accounting API (V3) at the present time.

Dryrun also integrates with Xero cloud-financial software.