👉 Catch the full replay here: https://youtu.be/0mpPMD43mUQ
Month-end is a grind. You export from QBO, rebuild the same Excel reports, patch formulas, and lose formatting. Next month you do it again. Budget season makes it worse. The real issue isn’t Excel. It’s stale data and repetitive work. Flash Reports fixes that by bringing live QuickBooks Online data into Excel so templates refresh, forecasts update in seconds, and multi-entity rollups stop being a weekend project.
Chris Meyer of Finatical Software put it bluntly during his App Academy session:
“What we’ve built and enabled is a solution to really make those reports live in Excel. So that you can build a template and then refresh that template on a monthly basis.”
At the heart of Finatical Software’s Flash Reports is a simple but powerful idea: keep accountants working where they’re comfortable—Excel—but give them live QuickBooks Online data instead of static exports.
The benefits go beyond saving time. With Flash, users can:
- Create custom budget vs. actual reports across multiple entities, departments, or classes.
- Drag and drop actuals into forecasts midyear to update projections instantly.
- Apply assumptions across prior results to build forward-looking budgets with accuracy.
- Maintain custom formatting in Excel while refreshing data directly from QBO.
Meyer pointed out how this approach is helping firms across industries. Nonprofits can prepare board-ready reports that consolidate across programs. Construction companies can track work-in-progress with live data. Property managers can generate consolidated P&Ls across multiple entities without the usual headaches.
By staying laser-focused on Excel rather than spreading across platforms, Finatical is betting on depth over breadth. “Each technology has different integration challenges,” Meyer said. “We’d rather be the best in one domain.”
As firms gear up for another budgeting season, tools like Flash Reports are pushing accountants past the grunt work of manual spreadsheets and into the strategic role they’re meant to play—analyzing, forecasting, and guiding decisions.
👉 Catch the full replay here: https://youtu.be/0mpPMD43mUQ