How onewith swim uses Finaloop to save hours on bookkeeping each month

The Challenge

Hayley describes herself as a founder of a “scrappy bootstrapped startup.” In order to grow her brand, she needed to focus on product development and marketing but ended up spending hours each week trying to keep track of her numbers and manually recording her own expenses.

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Hayley also spent a lot of time on financing - securing loans and outside capital for her business. As an ecommerce founder, she spent a lot of time applying for loans, grants, and certifications for her business, such as working on getting a Women-Owned Small Business certification. Every application required a P&L which took her hours to put together. At the suggestion of her accountant, she tried Quickbooks Online and was sorely disappointed with the result.

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"I’ve used Quickbooks before for my service-based business. It’s great for service-based businesses, not so much for DTC. I tried it and it was absolutely tortuous. I’m super comfortable with Quickbooks, but it’s not the solution for a Shopify DTC ecommerce business."

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Instead, Hayley excruciatingly pulled segmented reports from each platform in order to make P&Ls and balance sheets just so she had these reports on a monthly basis. She would download exports from Shopify and her bank statements, and look at all of her payment processing systems on a piece-by-piece basis but still had no real-time visibility.

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To make sure her numbers were accurate, she would sit down with her boyfriend, a finance guy, on a Friday night and they would start piecing together all these pieces to create financials. They spent an insane amount of time to get the view of her financials that she needed.

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When it came down to it, Hayley was looking to understand, on a daily basis, where onewith is when it comes to expenses vs revenue. She needed better visibility on her inventory versus cash flow and how those things talk to each other. On one hand, she wanted to make sure she had enough bestsellers in stock, since “80% of your sales come from 20% of your products,” while still making sure she had the finances to pay for new swimwear lines.

Especially in the early stages of the brand, every free penny went to inventory so tracking this was crucial.

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The Solution

One day, Hayley received an email about Finaloop from a partnering platform. Her immediate thought - “if this is what I think it is, it’s going to be a game changer for us.”

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She immediately signed up for the free trial and found it was exactly what she was looking for to reduce her admin work and actually give her the financial visibility she needed. After experiencing the platform for herself, she immediately showed it to her accountant and to her boyfriend, her two sources for financial advice, to get their expert opinions.

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Their reaction? “This is good. This is really, really good.”

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"There are so many functionalities within Finaloop I use on a day to day basis. I always have my Finaloop dashboard pulled up. It’s bookmarked in my browser so that, at a glance, I know my cash flow, net sales, net profits, and everything which is amazing."

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The Results

Having real-time financials has opened up so many opportunities for onewith since they can now complete applications and requests so much quicker with real-time output. Now, whenever she needs her P&L or balance sheet for an application, she just exports them and uploads them to whatever modality she needs. That, in and of itself, is a game changer for her.

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"I can’t believe we were doing this so painstakingly each time. Such a weight off my shoulders, I can’t even tell you."

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One of Hayley’s favorite features is that when reviewing your P&L, you can switch from dollar view to percentage view - seeing percentage-wise how much a certain expense is taking up of your revenue is incredibly valuable information when operating a brand. If she sees a certain expense is a really big piece of the pie, she digs deeper and asks herself, what is the ROI on that? What is that expense doing in terms of revenue generation?

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As a bootstrapped company, everything that they do has to be scrutinized from an internal perspective. This has allowed her to really manage her expenses and her cash flow.

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When asked how much time Finaloop saved her a month, her response was “it honestly makes me sick to my stomach to think about the amount of time I manually spent on expenses beforehand. Finaloop saves me days each month. Literally days.”

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The real-time cash flow report and the cash flow visibility on the dashboard has also allowed Hayley to finally make sure her cash flow and inventory are always speaking to each other. It allows her to better plan with her vendors, saving significantly on her inventory costs.

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"As someone in DTC ecommerce, I don’t know everything, but I do know that there is no other solution out there like Finaloop. It’s just that good. I’m Finalolop’s biggest fangirl. Pricing wise, it’s incredibly reasonable for the value that it adds and for the time it gives back to founders and to accounting teams within a small business."