From Data Chaos to Investor Confidence: Streamlining Financials for a $6M Retail Brand

1. Client Profile

• Industry: Consumer Goods / E-Commerce
• Channels: Omni-channel seller (Amazon FBA, Shopify D2C, and Etsy)
• Scale: $6M Annual Revenue
• The Context: This brand had found significant product-market fit and scaled revenue quickly across three different platforms. However, they took on outside investment to fund inventory, which triggered a requirement for professional, GAAP-compliant monthly reporting that their existing setup could not provide.

2. The Challenge

The "Growth Pain": Complexity Outpaced CapabilitySelling on Amazon, Shopify, and Etsy simultaneously created a "data silo" problem. The client was recording net deposits as revenue—missing the critical details regarding platform fees, returns, and sales tax collected.

• The Visibility Gap: With cash coming in from three sources at different times, the founder couldn't determine which channel was actually the most profitable.
• Investor Pressure: The investors required financial statements by the 15th of every month. The client was consistently missing these deadlines because their team spent weeks manually trying to reconcile the bank feed.
• Inventory Disconnect: COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) was not being tracked against sales in real-time, leading to surprise cash crunches when restocking bills arrived.

3. The Solution

We stepped in to transition the client from "cash-basis chaos" to "accrual-basis clarity."

• Tech Stack Integration: We implemented an accounting integration layer to automatically separate Gross Sales, Fees, and Sales Tax before the data hit the general ledger. This ensured the revenue numbers matched the actual sales dashboards on Amazon and Shopify.
• Historical Clean-Up: We performed a forensic reconciliation of the previous 12 months to correct the miscategorized "net deposits" and establish a clean baseline for the investors.
• Investor Reporting Package: We designed a custom monthly reporting packet that highlighted the metrics investors cared about most: Gross Margin per Channel, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), and Inventory Turnover.

4. The Results

By professionalizing the accounting function, we turned the finance department from a bottleneck into a strategic asset.

• 100% On-Time Reporting: We reduced the month-end close cycle from 25 days to 10 days, ensuring investors received their reports ahead of schedule every month.
• Audit-Ready Financials: The books are now reconciled to the penny across all three sales channels, eliminating the risk of tax penalties or due diligence failures during future funding rounds.
• Strategic Clarity: The client realized that while Amazon drove high volume, the margins were lower than realized due to hidden fees. They used our data to pivot resources toward their higher-margin Shopify store, increasing overall profitability by 12% in the first year.

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