Blog Post

Export mappings are a way for Commerce to associate your transactions to the appropriate accounts in your accounting system. In order to export transactions quickly and autonomously, Commerce leverages an export mapping library to automatically associate future transactions with the right accounts in your accounting file. Let's first take a look at the anatomy of an export.

If you are not familiar with the how Commerce exports data to an accounting file, we recommend that you first check out:

Anatomy of a sales export.
​ Anatomy of an expense export.

Export mappings are created in 1 of 3 ways, via memory mappings, customized mappings or SKU mappings.

The most common way Commerce maps accounts is with memory mappings. As you manually export transaction from Commerce to your accounting system, Commerce builds a library that correlates the attributes of the transaction with the previously used accounts. We then use this library to associate future transactions with similar attributes to the same accounts as previous transactions. This process of leveraging your export history to define future transactions is called Memory Mapping.

For more complex scenarios Commerce employs a rules engine to create pre-defined transaction mappings. Custom mappings can be helpful when there are multiple attributes that play a role in determining the appropriate account to map a transaction.

SKU mappings is a great way to automatically map transactions to an appropriate product or service item within your accounting program. In many cases, Commerce will have access to the underlining product SKU associated with your sales and purchases. When a SKU from the upstream provider matches a SKU within your accounting file, Commerce will map the line item to the appropriate product or service during export.

When there are multiple mapping methods in play, Custom Mappings will take precedence over SKU mappings and SKU mappings will take precedence over memory mappings.