How &Collar Reduced OPEX by 30% Using Finaloop

Challenge

As &Collar grew in revenue, it quickly outgrew its initial "mom and pop shop" bookkeeping solution with Quickbooks, recognizing that they needed a bookkeeping service with ecommerce expertise. 

The process of manually reconciling data from multiple sales channels consumed entire weekends each month. “You can have 10 different spreadsheets, trying to reconcile them all together,” Mark said.   

"When we were sub $1 million, it was just whoever down the street that did bookkeeping," Mark explained. "They didn't know a lot about ecom. We quickly realized, once we get to $5 million, it's more important to get someone who understands ecom."

After 4 or 5 different bookkeepers, they finally found an accounting service that understood ecommerce, but the price was prohibitively high - and &Collar still faced a significant lag in financial reporting time. 

"No matter who we used, we weren't closing books until the 15th of the month at the earliest," Mark said. "When we got the report on the 15th, we would look and say 'hey, it doesn't look right,' and then you're not actually closing until the 19th or 20th. So, we had insights from 20 days ago and weren't able to act quickly."

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Solution

When Mark discovered Finaloop, making the switch was a “no-brainer.”

“Finaloop connected with everything we needed automatically. All the integrations were there. You’re not paying to manually pull payment processing data from every single channel.”

The game changers

Ecommerce expertise

After working with quite a few generalist bookkeepers, Mark has been super happy with how knowledgable the Finaloop team is when it comes to e-commerce. “The whole team understands e-commerce really well. When we explained any problems, it wasn’t the first time our accounting firm had heard of them.”

Real-time data

The biggest game-changer has been access to real-time financial data. “We're able to go in on a daily basis and say, hey, what did net revenue look like across all channels? And then what is the net profit on any given day or week during the month? He said.”

“It sounds elementary, but you can’t improve a goal unless you’re tracking it well. Knowing where we are mid-month or midweek on a revenue or cost goal helps us hit that goal. Having that number in front of you every single day—whether it’s your revenue, contribution profit, or net profit goal—helps you get there.”

FIFO inventory management

More recently, &Collar implemented InventoryIQ, Finaloop’s inventory management tool, to accurately track landed costs using FIFO accounting. This has become especially critical amid recent tariff changes impacting production in China.

“Being able to correctly apply FIFO accounting and understand what your new margin is going to be when that inventory hits the shelves—if you're not dialed in there, a lot of businesses are going to be in trouble,” Mark said.

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Results

The impact of implementing Finaloop has been substantial for &Collar across multiple dimensions:

Dramatic time savings

"I used to kind of lock myself in my office for the weekend," Mark said. "Now I don't even really have allocated time to close books anymore. I just kind of go in there at the beginning of every month and make sure everything looks good. It's a 10x faster closer (almost infinity because its close to real time) for ~50% of the price.

Better strategic decision making

"Every quarter in the last year and a half, we've seen a 30 to 40% increase in actual profits, and I think a large part of that is because we've been so hawkish looking at things on a month-to-month or even week-to-week basis," Mark said.

"Finaloop has been the tool for us over the last 12 months to identify, 'hey, is every single cost essentially good or bad for the business?' We've been very quick to cut out a lot of things over the last year."

Significant cost reduction

Finaloop has helped &Collar identify and eliminate inefficient spending throughout their operations.

"Thirty percent of OPEX has been cut for &Collar over the last 12 months, and a huge part of that is because we're able to look at all those things in a silo pretty well with Finaloop," Mark says.

Enhanced inventory & COGS management

As &Collar faces significant tariff increases on their Chinese imports, their recent implementation of InventoryIQ is helping them navigate these challenges.

"Understanding the value of every single good that's coming from different countries or the same country at different tariff times is a necessity," Mark says. "If you don't do it, I think there's going to be a world where a lot of companies sadly kind of wake up and realize, 'oh, I have no more cash in the bank.'"

Real-time cash flow & margin management

In today's challenging e-commerce environment, where Mark notes that "margins are getting squeezed as much as they are," having accurate, timely financial data is more critical than ever.

"If we don't have that, we're really just flying blind."