The month closes on one set of numbers.
All American sells print equipment and consumables through several storefronts, with inventory in one system, costs in another, and the financials in a third. Getting a true margin picture meant reconciling all three by hand.
Switchboard has been a game changer. Within a few days we had all of our data centralized in one easy-to-use platform.
Three systems, three versions of the cost.
All American has been selling industrial print equipment and supplies for about forty years, across branches in California, Pennsylvania, and Texas, plus a custom-apparel storefront. Orders live in Shopify, stock lives in their inventory system, cost of goods sits in the ERP, and the financials sit in the accounting system.
Each of those systems is right about its own piece and silent about the rest. Working out gross margin by business line meant exporting from all of them and lining the numbers up in a spreadsheet, and when two of them disagreed about what something cost, finding out why was its own project.
The reconciliation happens before anyone opens a report.
Switchboard connected the storefronts, the inventory system, the ERP, and the accounting system, then built the finance model on top: what a unit actually costs, what margin looks like by business line and by storefront, how inventory rolls forward month to month. Our data engineers built it and keep it running, so the joining and the cost logic are settled before a number reaches a report.
That turned the month-end question from a reconciliation exercise into a lookup. When the CFO needed the prior year finalized, the adjustments came out of numbers that were already lined up rather than out of four export menus.
“Switchboard has been a game changer. Within a few days we had all of our data centralized in one easy-to-use platform. With Switchboard we’re able to make decisions faster and unlock new areas for growth without having to hire a data team.”Matthew Elliott, Controller All American Print Supply Co
Finance questions get answered as finance questions.
Cost of goods forensics, inventory roll-forward, gross margin by business line and storefront, deferred revenue, cohort value: the work that used to be a spreadsheet project is now a standing part of the reporting. When something looks off, the answer traces back through the model to the system it came from.
All of it runs without a data hire. The controller asks for what he needs, and the team that built the model is the same team that answers.
See it on your own numbers.
Book a demo. We'll walk through how the model would get built on a business like yours.