Challenge

For Luma Nutrition, moving from affiliate marketing on Amazon to a fast-growing ecommerce brand on Shopify meant finding a new accounting solution capable of meeting the company's evolving financial needs. 

Initially, Jake tried using the online accounting service he used for his affiliate marketing business.

“Once I started doing ecommerce, the fit just wasn’t good,” he said. “With ecommerce, you have the inventory component and should be doing accrual accounting.  Tracking [inventory] properly matters a lot more,” he said. 

Ultimately, working with bookkeepers that didn’t understand ecommerce created more work for Jake and his team. The bookkeepers often miscategorized expenses, forcing him to step in and make corrections.

“I just found a bookkeeper, and went through a few of them. The problem with all of them was that they're generalists. They just did not understand some of the specific requirements of ecommerce, specifically with handling inventory. I’d have to go in and fix things myself, so I wasn’t really sure how much time I was saving."

The bookkeeping errors compounded around tax time, leaving the company scrambling to correct the books under intense time pressure. 

The financial reporting process was painfully slow as well. Monthly reconciliations would often take 2-4 weeks to complete, severely limiting the company's ability to make timely, data-driven decisions. By the time they received the financial data, it was already outdated.

Beyond the accuracy and timing issues, Jake said standard reports provided little actionable insight for an ecommerce business with unique financial needs. "It was really just basic stuff and the effort was basic,” he said. “And the innovation—there was no innovation."  

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Solution

Jake heard about Finaloop from colleagues and decided to give it a try. He loved the idea that it was a solution built for ecommerce accounting—and designed to keep up with the industry's rapid pace of change.

With Finaloop’s real-time access to financial data, Jake could access accurate, up-to-date profit and loss statements without waiting 2-4 weeks for reconciled data. It allows him to monitor expenses and revenue with confidence. 

The profitability dashboard became a cornerstone of his workflow. “It’s an easier-to-read format,” Jake said, highlighting its clear month-over-month comparisons of cost categories like marketing and cost of delivery. This streamlined reporting enabled him to identify expense spikes and take corrective action.

The increased visibility has been particularly valuable for managing advertising spend.

"Even if our efficiency looks good, there's still a top-level budget on the advertising side that we can't surpass, and Finaloop does a better job of showing us what that is," he added. 

Finaloop’s AI-driven platform and integrations streamlined Luma Nutrition’s financial processes. It automates data collection, eliminating the need for Jake to manually re-categorize transactions. 

The support team further eased his workload. “I can email support, and usually they’ll take care of everything for me,” Jake said, a stark contrast to the unresponsive providers of his past.

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Results

Implementing Finaloop has transformed financial operations at Luma Nutrition in several key ways:

No more delayed financial data

Luma Nutrition often had to wait four weeks to close the books. Switching to Finaloop eliminated the wait entirely, allowing Jake and his team to make decisions with accurate and updated financial data.  

Full financial picture at a glance

Jake checks his financials 2-3 times a week, but he also uses it to track financial trends in the company over time. "It's more to look at month-over-month data... What is our contribution margin month over month? What is our cost of goods month over month?"

Your entire financial story—no guesswork 

While other management tools provide a view of the company’s contribution margin, “it's not a true profit and loss,” Jake said. “Finaloop does a better job of showing that because we can see our true profit and loss easier."

No more budget blind spots

Keeping track of the biggest expenses keeps Luma Nutrition safely within its margins, particularly in categories like advertising. "That's by far our biggest expense. We pay a lot of attention to that category and have to make sure that we're not going too crazy on ads because that will hurt our net margin the most."