Case Study

Reduced Month-end Close From Days to Minutes

It began with Full Stack Finance.

Full Stack Finance embeds teams of experienced finance, accounting and HR professionals within Startups and high-growth businesses according to their operational needs. Full Stack ensures that their client's financials are ready for internal and external stakeholders.

Full Stack has a high-growth ecommerce client within the food and beverage industry. When the store first launched, it generated millions of revenue on the first day. The client acquired expert help from certified public accountant Suzanne McNulla from Full Stack Finance to assist with their finance and accounting needs, including monthly close and financial reporting.

The journey came with challenges.

Given the high volume of daily transactions, Suzanne experienced layers of challenges before she could access the data to begin the process of month-end close.

Manual Data Download.

With the large transaction volume from the ecommerce client, it took Suzanne 3+ hours to download order information from Shopify. Frequently, the files were too large to open, and the export would fail halfway through the process. To combat the file size downloading constraints, Suzanne started downloading the data in 3-day increments, adding even more time to the process. The data downloading process was then repeated for the payment processor and bank data. There was also a risk of an incomplete data set due to the arduous and manual downloading process.

Data Aggregation.

All downloaded data was then aggregated and matched into a large spreadsheet, adding five more hours each month to the workload. In total, Suzanne spent more than 20 hours each month downloading, then aggregating the data set before she could reconcile the data for accounting and financial reporting. These challenges were time-consuming, frustrating, and inefficient.

Ecommerce client met Blue Onion.

To streamline the monthly accounting close for the ecommerce client, Suzanne looked into different accounting software that could automate the order-to-cash reconciliation process. Her most important request was that the data from all three pillars - order management systems, payment processors, and bank payouts were synced. With Full Stack Finance's COO Andrew Chen's recommendation, Suzanne onboarded this stealth client to Blue Onion, a SaaS company that syncs and automates order-to-cash reconciliations and financial reporting for accountants in ecommerce companies.

20 minutes to onboard.

Unlike typical accounting or SaaS software implementation time, it only took Suzanne 20 minutes to fully onboard the client onto Blue Onion's platform.

[Automatically organized and clean data ready to go].

The process that previously took multiple frustrating hours, now with Blue Onion only takes about 15 minutes. The data is already synced and reconciled from the order to the payment processor, then to the bank payout.

[Accessible information for actionable insights.]

With a streamlined workflow and a clean dataset, Suzanne can focus on delivering high-impact accounting and finance recommendations to her clients. For example, because Blue Onion offers an exportable audit trail of records, it's easy to find fulfilled and unfulfilled transactions. The BlueOnion platform provides accurate, accessible, and easy overviews of reconciled data, which translates to fast, and high-confidence data proof when the client asks Suzanne for advice.

Blue Onion Pro-tip from Suzanne.

In addition to the time savings, when Suzanne calculates COGS for the month's end, she can do a direct match on fulfilled orders throughBlue Onion, giving both her and the client's accounting team more accurate information and greater confidence that the business is scaling efficiently.

The journey continues.

Blue Onion has eliminated the arduous process of manual data downloading, syncing, and reconciling. Suzanne has not only saved days each month but also with data integrity and confidence. With no more manual data pull and reconciliation, Suzanne and the client's accounting team can focus on growing and scaling the business. Through Full Stack Finance, Suzanne has introduced and onboarded her portfolio of ecommerce clients with Blue Onion.

AT A GLANCE

Reducedmonth-end data processing time from 3+ days to 15 minutes

Increasedtime efficiency by over 90%

CLIENT SUMMARY

 Client Name: Stealth

 Industry: E-commerce

Order Management System: Amazon Seller&Shopify

Payment Processor: Paypal & ShopPay

It used to take me 20+ hours per month per client to sync and download the order and payout data - not yet cleaned nor reconciled.

It only takes me 15 mins with Blue Onion, and all the records are already reconciled.
- Suzanne McNulla,
Full Stack Finance