From Books to Board Pack in 30 Minutes: Getting Started with Aziell

New-tool anxiety is real. The honest way to reduce it is to show the full setup path up front — not the polished demo video, but the actual click path an operator follows on day one. This is that walkthrough. Thirty minutes, five steps, a real board pack at the end.

You will need three things before you start: a QuickBooks Online admin login, your branch or location list (even if it is on a napkin), and about 45 minutes if you have never done this before. Operators who have set up one FP&A tool already can do this in under 20.

Step 1 — Connect QuickBooks (≈5 minutes)

The only data source that is truly required is your general ledger. From the Aziell onboarding screen, click Connect QuickBooksand complete the Intuit OAuth flow. Aziell requests read-only access to your journal entries, chart of accounts, class list, and location list. It does not request write scope. Nothing you do in Aziell will ever push a journal back to your books.

On the first sync, Aziell pulls 24 months of history. That gives you enough data to seed your baseline drivers and two years of trend lines for the Copilot to reason against. Expect the initial pull to take two to four minutes depending on book size.

If you are curious how the sync layer works under the hood, the QuickBooks integration guide covers scope, latency, and handling of class vs. location dimensions in detail.

Step 2 — Map your branches (≈5 minutes)

Aziell infers branches from your QuickBooks Location dimension if you use it, from Class if you do not, and lets you create them manually otherwise. Each branch gets a name, an opening date, a geographic market, and a segmentation tag.

The opening-date field seems trivial; it is not. It unlocks “months since open” cohort analysis, so a 13-month branch is compared to other 13-month branches, not to the six-year-old flagship. If you care about honest branch benchmarking, set opening dates correctly here and skip the pain later.

Step 3 — Import and review your chart of accounts (≈10 minutes)

Aziell imports your COA and auto-classifies each account into one of four roles: revenue, COGS, labor, or overhead. The auto-classifier is tuned to multi-location service verticals, and it gets 90%+ of accounts right on first pass. Your job on this screen is to fix the 10%.

The accounts that tend to need a manual nudge:

• Accounts named “Contractor” that should be labor rather than overhead.
• Credit card rewards, which the classifier flags as revenue because of the sign — reclassify as contra-expense.
• Multi-purpose “Supplies” accounts, which you may want to split between COGS and overhead.

This is the most consequential ten minutes of the whole setup. Everything downstream — the driver tree, the benchmarks, the Copilot recommendations — depends on whether each dollar is on the right row.

Step 4 — Build your first driver-based plan (≈8 minutes)

Click Plan and Aziell seeds a 12-month plan using your trailing twelve-month actuals and the three-revenue-driver structure described in our driver-based budgeting framework. The driver defaults come from your actuals: capacity is your current chair / truck / seat count, utilization is your trailing twelve-month average, and average ticket is your realized number.

You do not need a perfect plan on day one. Set a growth assumption on one driver (say, pushing utilization from 68% to 73% over six months), let the rest hold flat, and save. Aziell will immediately compute the consolidated P&L impact and flag any line that drifts outside its historical range.

Fork the plan into branches with one click. Each branch inherits the company-level assumptions; override only the cells that are actually different — local wage, lease, or payer mix.

Step 5 — Export your first board pack (≈2 minutes)

From the Reports tab, click Export board pack. Aziell generates a PDF with four sections: executive summary, consolidated P&L with BvA, branch leaderboard on the six core metrics, and CFO Copilot recommendations for the current month. It is cover-page-ready — your logo, your fiscal calendar, your color palette.

This is the part that most first-time users do not expect: the board pack is a full document, not a data dump. The commentary is generated from the variance deltas, so the exec summary says things like “Branch 7 labor ran 230 bps over plan, driven primarily by a 12-shift overstaff in weeks 3 and 4.” You can edit the prose inline before exporting.

What to do after the first 30 minutes

You are now through the setup. The next three actions, in order, unlock most of the platform’s upside:

1. Connect Gusto. Payroll is the other dimension that matters most. Gusto syncs pull labor hours and wages by employee and map to branches via department codes. Live labor productivity updates daily.
2. Let the CFO Copilot run overnight. By the next morning, the Copilot will surface debt, pricing, and lease opportunities ranked by enterprise-value uplift. Our Debt Optimizer deep dive walks through a typical first-week recommendation set.
3. Build three scenarios. Base, upside, downside. This takes another 15 minutes and converts the plan from a point estimate into a decision tool. The scenario planning guide has the full playbook.

If you get stuck

The highest-friction moment in setup is almost always the COA review in Step 3. If a branch is missing from the location map or a class is not tagging correctly, nine times out of ten the fix is in QuickBooks — usually a transaction that was booked without a class or location tag. The fastest path is to correct it in QuickBooks and resync. Aziell’s data lineage will show you the exact journal line causing the break.

Beyond that, hello@aziell.com reaches a product engineer during business hours.