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The evolution of the mass accretion rate and the internal structure of protostellar envelopes are important keys to understand the star formation process. During the short lived (few 10E5yrs)
protostellar evolutionary phase most of the final stellar mass is accreted and simultaneously most of the excess angular momentum is transported away. This talk will focus on our approach to quantitatively compare model predictions of protostellar observables (e.g. Tbol, Lbol, Menv) with observations of protostars caught in the act of forming. This comparison enables us to constrain important parameters such as the ratio of mass accretion and ejection rate, the radial density distribution of the envelope, the duration of the Class0 phase and also provides a quantitative measure of how well the models explain the observations. Furthermore, it can be shown that initial conditions influence the observable properties of protostars and that evolutionary tracks depend on the accretion history. Finally the talk will also discuss in detail the assumptions and
simplifications used in the current models and possible biases in the available observational data.
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