How do you connect finance and accounting tools to Metabase?
Finance analytics in Metabase starts by syncing the systems that record cash, accounting, spend, invoices, and settlement into a database. This cluster covers ERP and accounting systems, bank-data APIs, spend management, global accounts, and payment platforms, with one shared rule: every published metric should reconcile to the source at a documented grain and period.
Boundary: internal finance, ledger, spend, and banking systems live here. Customer-facing billing and payment guides such as Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, and Razorpay remain in revenue & billing and are cross-linked where settlement or fee analysis overlaps.
Which finance tools can you analyze?
How should finance data reach Metabase?
- Explore: use an official or approved community MCP server with read-only scopes for a narrow question, then upload a sanitized CSV with the Metabase CLI.
- Operationalize: use the official API, OData service, database interface, or managed connector to land raw data in a warehouse.
- Model: normalize currency, signs, lifecycle states, accounting periods, entities, and dimensions into reusable finance models.
- Reconcile: compare a closed period and known source report before publishing dashboards.
What shared finance data model works across tools?
| Model | Grain | Common fields |
|---|---|---|
modeled_gl | one posting line | account, entity, period, department, native amount, reporting amount |
modeled_open_ar | one invoice balance | customer, issue date, due date, open amount, status, currency |
modeled_cash_movements | one bank, payment, or settlement movement | account, date, amount, currency, counterparty, category, status |
modeled_spend | one cleared expense or bill line | vendor, category, department, owner, coding status, amount |
modeled_budget_actuals | one period-account-dimension | budget, actual, variance, version, reporting currency |
Which finance dashboards should you build?
For: CFO and finance leaders
Cash and working capital
See liquidity, collections, payables, and short-term risk.
For: FP&A
Plan and performance
Explain how actual performance differs from the plan.
- Budget vs. actuals
- Operating expense by department
- Gross margin bridge
- Rolling forecast inputs
For: Controllers
Close and reconciliation
Surface incomplete, unposted, and unreconciled records.
- Bank-to-ledger exceptions
- Unposted and uncoded transactions
- Intercompany imbalance
- Source-to-model reconciliation
For: Finance operations
Spend and payments
Prioritize the work behind collections, spend, and settlement.
- Vendor spend and concentration
- Payment success and settlement lag
- Policy exceptions and missing coding
- FX exposure and cross-border fees
Which finance metrics should you standardize?
- Cash runway
- Accounts receivable aging
- Days sales outstanding
- Burn rate
- Gross margin
- Budget variance
- Invoice collection rate
- FX exposure
- Failed-payment rate
What controls keep finance dashboards trustworthy?
- Show source refresh time and the latest complete accounting period.
- Retain native currency, reporting currency, and the FX rate used.
- Use explicit signs for inflow, outflow, debit, and credit.
- Keep pending, posted, paid, settled, and reconciled states separate.
- Test source counts and amounts after every schema or connector change.
- Apply Metabase permissions to sensitive employee, customer, and bank data.