Earmark Podcast | Earn Free Accounting CPE

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Stacey Feldman: [00:00:00] It's finding a balance to allow the accounting team to close it and not have material adjustments, but have confidence that these numbers are accurate, but also give the company the real time data. And I think having a data warehouse is incredibly important to feed, information to analyze. We talk a lot about or hear a lot about CFOs who are now adopting the data function in companies.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:27] If you'd like to earn CPE credit for listening to this episode, visit earmark Cpcomm. Download the app, take a short quiz and get your CPE certificate. Continuing education has never been so easy. And now on to the episode. Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Earmark podcast. I'm your host, Blake Oliver, CPA, joined today by Stacy Feldman, CPA. Stacy, welcome to the show.

Stacey Feldman: [00:00:58] Thank you, Blake. I'm really excited to be here. It's my first podcast.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:02] Your first podcast. Wow. Well, I hope it's a good one. I'm going to do my best. I'll be a good student or I'll try to be anyway. I wasn't a very good traditional student, but this sort of thing really fits. You know, obviously what I like to do, which is podcasting and I'm really eager to talk to you today about our topic, which is something that I personally have never had a chance to get involved in in accounting. And I know that many of our listeners are very excited to learn about it from you. You have a lot of experience in this area currently the Comptroller at Sunday. Tell me about Sunday and what is CPG when it comes to Sunday.

Stacey Feldman: [00:01:46] All right. Well, CPG to start is consumer packaged goods. So it kind of lumps in any physical product that a company sells. And it's a term that's used to describe an industry. And Sunday, where I'm at now, I've been there for about a year and a half, Sunday sells custom lawn care products on a subscription basis to customers. So you'll get a sample of your lawn, you'll send a sample in of your specific lawn type, send it back and they'll tell you, you know, you're deficient in iron. You need these phosphorus. Here's what we recommend and you'll buy a subscription and we'll send you product throughout the year as your lawn needs specific fertilizer care.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:27] That sounds great. I would totally sign up but don't have a lawn because I live in Arizona, so.

Stacey Feldman: [00:02:33] That puts a wrench in the mix. Yes. You're not our target customer. No, but I forgot to add that the big draw to Sunday is that it's taking on the major chemicals that are in competing products like Trugreen or Scotts. It's a more natural product that's better for the earth and better for people.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:52] Well, that's great. So you're taking away that trip that people have to make to the big box stores to get all their supplies. And you're giving them better, more natural chemicals. Well, you're taking out the chemicals, right? It's the natural stuff for their lawn care. That's great.

Stacey Feldman: [00:03:08] And it's also the education piece. It's incredibly confusing of, you know, especially our generation of how the heck do I manage a lawn? I have a lawn now. I don't know how to keep it green. Yeah. Take away that that confusion and allow consumers to just take the product, put it on and it's done.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:26] Do you have any education around like cacti or supplement succulents? Because I seem to kill those too.

Stacey Feldman: [00:03:31] We have multiple Ph.D.s on staff who are very talented at anything plant related. I know nothing. I'm not your resource. I do the accounting in the book, so I can't give you any advice. But there's plenty of folks who can give that advice on our customer service team.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:49] So this is not your first gig in a CPG company. You've been doing this, I guess, pretty much your whole career. Yeah. And you had a long stint at Popsockets where you were the first hire at Popsockets. Does that mean like first accounting hire or just first hire period.

Stacey Feldman: [00:04:09] First employee That wasn't a gardener of the founder. So first employee.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:17] Yeah. Wow. And Popsockets for those who don't know are those I have one. I don't know really how to describe it. It's this thing attached to the back of my phone. I pull it out and I can hold my phone with one hand. There you go. You're holding it up right there. For our listeners, for our viewers on YouTube, you can see a popsocket being demonstrated. Basically, if you like to take selfies, which I do. I don't know about you, but I like to take selfies. It's very handy because you don't have to worry about dropping your phone. So I guess that was your entree into CPG.

Stacey Feldman: [00:04:51] That was, yeah, I think most people who fall into CPG do that. They fall into it. It's not a class you can take in college and learn about CPG accounting. It's, you know, you happen to find a company and you learn a lot of the tools of the trade on the job. And that's exactly that's exactly what happened to me.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:12] And before that, you did an internship at PwC. But did you ever and you didn't end up taking an offer at PwC, you just decided to go straight into industry?

Stacey Feldman: [00:05:23] No, it's actually a more complicated story than that. I graduated in the East Coast or I should back up. I went to school at a private business school in Rhode Island and the school grooms, staff or students to do Big Four accounting, do investment banking, big corporate type roles. And my. Junior year I went to study abroad in New Zealand and I had already had a two week internship lined up for when I returned back from the Study Abroad Abroad program. When I was there, I fell in love with the mountains. Just the outdoor lifestyle. It's nothing I'd ever been really exposed to in the US where I was in New England and I met people there who went to see you, Boulder in Colorado, and they were like, You know, Stacey, we have these mountains in the US. You just need to come west a little bit. And so I, I went home, I went to the WTC internship, had a great time in tax. I was planning to either do that or go to the investment banking route in New York. But I. A really wanted to be near the mountains, so I wasn't able to get my TWC offer moved to Denver.

Stacey Feldman: [00:06:36] They said you can work a year and then we can think about transferring you there. So then I got an interview with E! And I got an offer from Denver in Colorado. So I accepted that offer. Right out of school. I had a year off to get my CPA license in between graduation and when the offer started. So in that year I was just doing odd jobs. When I moved to Colorado weddings, just anything I could pick up to pay rent while I studied for the exams. And a friend of mine connected me with this weird guy that takes product photos for this company that he just started. And so I connected with him and that was the founder of Pop Sockets. And at the time it was him and whoever he could pick up off the street to help him put some product together and try to try to sell it. So that was in 2014. And I, you know, started I put product together. Everything was broken. A lot of defects with the products and the supply chain. So it was very much fulfillment. Get the product out the door, which then so.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:43] This was like at the stage where all the product was coming in from the manufacturer. Was this in China? Yeah. And so you're getting it. And what are you doing this in a garage, putting stuff together, shipping it out? Is it at that level?

Stacey Feldman: [00:07:56] He had moved to a 500 square foot office in downtown Boulder at the time, so we weren't in his garage anymore. We did have the office space. But yeah, I mean, it was cardboard boxes with I think the first order was 10,000 units and all of them the packaging had split open. So all of them we had to go back and staple each one. And the manufacturing of actually this rubber piece was was not solid and it didn't fit specifications. So we had to look at each one QC, each one to see which ones we could actually feel comfortable sending to customers.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:28] Wow. Were you shipping direct to customers at this point? Was it like I could go by on your website or was this selling to stores that were then distributing it?

Stacey Feldman: [00:08:38] At this time it was mostly on the website, which had traction from a Kickstarter campaign that started the summer before and then a store downtown that sold a few. And I think we had a small presence on Amazon at that point as well.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:54] And so you rode this wave with Popsockets for five years, more than five years. You were the first hire. After a couple of years, you became the accounting manager. A couple more years. Assistant corporate controller. By the time you left, what was the scale of Popsockets?

Stacey Feldman: [00:09:12] When I left, we had just under 300 million in revenue. I think about seven global entities across the across the world and about 200 employees. Wow.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:26] So you employee number one, you left when it was 200. That's incredible. I mean, I joined a startup. Let's see, I've been at a startup when I was employee 80 and then also employee eight. And there's just a humongous difference in those early days going to 200. That's incredible.

Stacey Feldman: [00:09:43] It was yeah, it was an incredibly wonderful learning experience. It was tough. I mean, to have to start my career out that way and have set those expectations in my own mind. I'm still working through some of those things of how I want my relationship to work to be. But it was it was fabulous. And it was I want to say I was there about six months when I think I was there about a week, and they said, We'd like to hire you, please help us.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:10] And so you were just like in there temp helping, like help out a friend kind of thing.

Stacey Feldman: [00:10:14] Yeah, I have emails saved and the founder saying, We like you, you're smart. We'd like you to do whatever you can do. Please, please come do whatever it is that you can help us with. And I mean, that was everything at the time, you know, coordinating with manufacturers in Asia, building a supply chain model. Those were the early requirements that we had to work through and then scaling the company saying we need to hire someone to manage e-commerce or we need to. Figure out how to record these sales in a software. How do we track inventory? All of these fundamental questions that we had to work through to make make it scalable and make it grow.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:58] So let's talk about that. What was the first big challenge that you had to solve in accounting for Popsockets?

Stacey Feldman: [00:11:07] That's an interesting question because, you know, I came straight out of school with an accounting degree, but you don't really know much when you come out of school on the practicality of accounting. And so we did bring in a couple of years after we brought in an outsourced firm to help us really lock in cash to a cruel switches, gross up revenues and make things more GAAP compliant. That wasn't too difficult from an accounting perspective. It wasn't until we switched from QuickBooks to a big ERP. That was a big maturity test for us as a company and really required us to button up the accounting and the inventory compliance.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:51] So that was the big accounting challenge switching from QuickBooks to ERP. Which one did you end up using?

Stacey Feldman: [00:11:56] We switched with to Microsoft Dynamics NAV, which who knows if that was a good decision or not.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:02] But I mean, you can always second guess yourself with these choices, right? Like you go into it not knowing half of what it really does because you're hearing it from salespeople, right? And so then it's the actual implementation where you find out how does how well does this work? And with QuickBooks, you can test stuff, right? But with these ERPs, you got to buy it before you can really use it.

Stacey Feldman: [00:12:24] Yeah. And there's no going back. There's no editing, which is great for audit purposes, but. Right. You can make a lot of mistakes. And the big just to give you a testament of how poorly the integration went, we we went live in August of 2017, 2016, 2017. I can't remember. And we didn't you didn't know how to pull a PNL or a balance sheet. You had to build that and we didn't have a tech person to build it. So we were waiting on our implementation partner to build a balance sheet and by the time we built it, had it to review it, the income statement, even we realized that we didn't load costs to our items when we uploaded them to the system costing never got loaded. So we're selling millions of these units at zero cost. Margins looked great, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:13:14] Yeah, yeah. 100% margin can't beat that.

Stacey Feldman: [00:13:17] So we had to go through a full remediation process. And I just remember my colleagues and I just heads on our desks fully defeated. It was it was challenging. It was it was really hard.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:30] So what's the solution to that is go back and book a bunch of journal entries to try to estimate your costs for these periods.

Stacey Feldman: [00:13:36] Well, thankfully, we used the implementation partners that we use to help us with that, to basically rebook the details and the data based on the actual sales that occurred. It was a bit easier for us because we were pretty much turnkey and purchasing the same product from the factory that we then sold. For the most part, if we had had more of a manufacturing component to our supply chain, it would have caused it to be a lot more difficult.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:03] Oh yeah, with doing the builds and the raw materials and all that. Okay, so you had it pretty relatively simple where you're just you're buying the finished product from the manufacturer, so you have a pretty good idea of what your cost is per unit.

Stacey Feldman: [00:14:17] Yeah. And the way we looked at it is you could customers could upload an image or we could print any graphic on top of a blank white grip. But in the system, there's no cost differential to printing the different graphic that's on the grip. So every unit was the same cost. And then whatever the customer purchased on the Internet with the skew, the system kind of integrated those two to allow for the same costing, but also track the sales data of that particular item.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:48] So earlier you mentioned something about creating a supply chain, mapping out the supply chain. What do you mean by that? That was one of your earlier jobs.

Stacey Feldman: [00:14:57] Yeah, I mean, at Popsockets it was more so creating a schedule and, you know, Google Doc to track all of the components that were purchasing from the supplier across multiple different suppliers and just tracking where our product is on, on the water at the supplier at the dock. So we effectively built an MRP manufacturing resource planning tool in Google Sheets just so we knew. Okay, we have these this one components coming in in three weeks, which means we'll have that stock or we had you didn't know what you would be able to sell and when if you got a big Amazon order or a big Sam's Club order, you didn't know whether you could accept it or not if you didn't have that tracker. Tell you where your inventory is and when it's coming in.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:47] Got it. So you were the master of that spreadsheet?

Stacey Feldman: [00:15:51] I wasn't the master at the start, but I built the foundation. And then once we then we brought in a supply chain specific person who took that over.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:01] Got it. And when you say like, kind of give me give us a visual for what this thing looked like. When you say components, are you talking about like the product in the packaging or did you have to actually track all the separate components in the supply chain as well?

Stacey Feldman: [00:16:16] Well, that's an interesting question When you talk about how companies build supply chain, because in the early days, we had the capability of customers fully customize their product so you could have a pink bass, a black accordion and then a graphic top and you could mix and match whatever it is you wanted to to build. And so therefore, we had more components that we needed to purchase and manage over time.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:42] Got it. And you would then create that customized popsocket for them With my hands. With your hands.

Stacey Feldman: [00:16:49] In the early days, it was printing these graphics on a heat press, burning your hand, trying to do it up till midnight, trying to print as many to get a shipment out to customers. But what I wanted to hit on though is that was a more complicated way for us to scale. I mean, to have to manage all those different components and effectively a raw material. I mean, for us it is the baseline raw material. We don't really have like the actual resins and stuff, but versus let's buy a fully assembled unit from the factory, let's streamline our operations. We can better forecast on those units versus having to purchase each of the individual components. And let's say yellow, for example, is not as popular. You're never going to get that forecasting, right? So let's consolidate it. Let's simplify the supply chain to make all of our lives easier. So that was a big piece in the process of making this scalable and making it easier to track and manage operationally, I think, to the success of the long term growth.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:00] So at what point did that happen where you stopped customizing them and you just started? Only making the fully finished variants.

Stacey Feldman: [00:18:10] I don't know if I know that answer everything. Now for me, for Popsockets, since it's been about three years, it's all just like mushed in into one. Yeah, one.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:19] That's kind of how startups are, right? It's sort of like you go into battle and you really don't know what happened when you just know it happened. Yeah, it's it's totally different. It's a totally different kind of job. It's hard to describe if you haven't had it, but at some point you all decided, okay, this isn't scalable and we need to we need to simplify this.

Stacey Feldman: [00:18:39] Yeah, I think that's probably when we brought on a COO who had manufacturing experience, who knew what conversations to have with suppliers, who knew how to scale something into a real business versus, you know, us trying to figure out what the best thing is to do.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:55] So you've got this spreadsheet that you're using in Google Sheets to track your cost of your different components and where they are, and are you going to have enough to fulfill these orders that come in. And I imagine you're starting to get bigger and bigger orders. So that becomes, you know, more and more of a challenge. It's not just Blake ordering his customized unicorn popsocket in Scottsdale that you have to send. It's somebody ordering like 10,000 of them, right? Yeah. So. So, you know, like let's talk about the other side of this. Right? We talked about the cost. Let's talk about the the orders. Um, you know, what was it when you came in? What were you doing to take orders?

Stacey Feldman: [00:19:38] We had the website on Shopify, Shopify platform, so the majority were coming through Shopify and then a small component on Amazon. So they all kind of funneled into the shipping software. We use Shipstation, which allows the order to come in and prints the shipping label, pull it off, stick it on the box. I think when I started there were probably like 3 to 4 orders a day. I mean, it was small and we were taking them down the street, bringing them to the post office, dropping them off. And then over time I just remember like more and more and more boxes dropping them off at the at the post office, filling up the whole shelf at the post office. As we grew, eventually we had pick ups and they came to us, which was why didn't we think of that sooner? So that was the direct to consumer piece. And again, those orders were just tracked in Amazon, Seller Central and Shopify, and we had integrations with those two platforms into QuickBooks Online.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:33] Did you have a single inventory or were you having to manage it separately in Amazon and Shopify?

Stacey Feldman: [00:20:39] We didn't. We just put inventory in Amazon and Shopify. Okay, Got it.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:43] So you just take, right, because so you just take the orders there and you'd hope that you had the components. Exactly.

Stacey Feldman: [00:20:49] Okay. We just hoped and most of the time we did. And if we didn't, we'd had to reach out to customers and then figure that out. But for Amazon we were doing fulfilled by Amazon for a lot of orders. So we shipped them a bulk units and we're able to fulfill the fulfilled by Amazon Order. Are you familiar with the difference? I can explain that. If not.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:08] Yeah, I think that would be interesting for our listeners. So I know that fulfilled by Amazon is where like they handle all the logistics, right? You, you send them your finished products and then they do it all. Is that right?

Stacey Feldman: [00:21:21] Exactly. They put it in their warehouses and the customer purchases and they manage that fulfillment so you get more of a bulk order from them. You send them that bulk order, then they manage the individual fulfillment.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:32] But it's pricey, right?

Stacey Feldman: [00:21:34] It's pricey. Yeah. I think any Amazon sale is pricey. They're going to take a lot of deductions back for the the whole process of working with them. I think on average, Amazon takes 15 to 20% of each sale for fulfilled.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:50] It's like I heard it can be as high as 30% on a sale with fulfilled by Amazon.

Stacey Feldman: [00:21:54] I don't remember the metrics, but I believe that.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:57] Yeah because I mean you got to think about it right there. That cost of of the postage, you don't have that anymore. They're warehousing it for you. You know, they're selling it on their website. So, I mean. There's some justification for it, but it is a lot right for small companies.

Stacey Feldman: [00:22:12] And if your margins support it, it's a fantastic model. I think for us, our margins were very favorable and it supported that model where we were willing to get that exposure at that cost because we still had buffer after after their fees. If you're talking about a small food and beverage customer where margins are a lot tighter, I think it's a different conversation of what is the true benefit of working with Amazon. If you're breaking even, if your customers are finding you on Amazon and it's not sustainable for you. You may want to shift your your strategy to have customers find you on your website, whether that's marketing SEO versus just getting exposure on Amazon. So I think it's industry specific even further within CPG.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:56] Yeah. If you have good margins, which you did because you're basically selling, you know, plastic pieces, right? I mean it's I'm what was the are you allowed to talk about what the cost was, what the margins were? I imagine that might be confidential information. But yeah, give us an idea.

Stacey Feldman: [00:23:16] Very, very. I don't think I'll ever very good margins like that again. Yeah, very good. And the benefit too is that there was a patent on the product. So really great margins with the patent. So it's really a recipe for success.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:28] That's great. Well, you know, and just going back to what you were doing at the beginning where you were taking these custom orders and then, you know, shipping, making them, shipping them out, it's not scalable, but it's a really great way to build customer loyalty and really happy customers, right? Because they're getting something that's totally unique and they're going to go out and talk about this thing. And it kind of makes me think of, you know, how Uber started as a black car service. And now it's, you know, just everybody's cars. But originally it was much more upscale in that sense and it was much less scalable.

Stacey Feldman: [00:24:03] Yeah. I think for Popsockets, what really put the product on the map was the promotional product industry. So you think of a pen A I don't even know what people promote with these days, but.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:18] A Patagonia vests or even.

Stacey Feldman: [00:24:20] Small trinkets like.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:22] Here's a.

Stacey Feldman: [00:24:22] Mug, a mug, anything that companies put their brand on. If you go to trade shows, what are they handing out? A stress ball, a USB, whatever they're sending to customers. This product worked really well in the promotional product industry. So to answer your original question of how we were able to scale, we found a partner who their industry was promotional products. And what they do is they bring in the raw product, they print screen the company logo on that product, and then they send that to customers. So for us, as we started to get those 10,000 unit orders for T mobile, for example, we sent the blank product to our promotional partner. They had three color options, so very limited supply chain supply options for customers and they printed and fulfilled for us. They had the distribution or they had the method of distributing and which we didn't have, and we had a full different pricing model for that industry. And then what you see from that as a result is you're at trade shows. You see, I mean, this is fantastic real estate to have a logo here. Oh yeah. And it just it took off. So that really put the company on the map.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:33] Yeah. I remember when that got really popular. All of these promotional products, they have their sort of life cycle and Popsockets was just humongous. They were everyone had one. Everyone was giving them out at trade shows.

Stacey Feldman: [00:25:44] Yeah, it was it really great option for us to. To get exposure and for everyone to really know what the product was. So.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:53] It was great because you're just shipping large quantities of these blank popsockets instead of having to put them all together. Yeah.

Stacey Feldman: [00:25:59] And they had the ability to print and fulfill for us. So they had that option and we leveraged that that partner to expand into wholesale with customers as well. And they would ship to mom and pop shops, big box stores like Sam's Club. I can't remember if they did like Target and Walmart and such with us. I can't remember where we the tipping point was because what happened was we then found our own three partners that specifically was for CPG companies, and then we shifted all of the non promotional business to the three model.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:35] So I took us off a track a little bit. We were talking about fulfilled by Amazon. You tell us about you were going to tell us about the other option, which is FBM, what's that fulfilled by?

Stacey Feldman: [00:26:46] Merchant So you have Amazon seller Central, which you have FBA or FBM, and you can either send product to Amazon for them to fulfill fulfilled by Amazon or you can have it fulfilled by merchant, which is the product owner, and they'll just send you customer orders one by one and you'll individually send those out as if they were purchasing on your website. So much more hands on. But if you have the the fulfillment capabilities, then it's a great resource.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:13] And how did you do the accounting for all of this? You had Shopify, you had Amazon, you had the the three, you had the promotional, what you call the. Yeah, yeah. How did you you know, I mean, how did you get all that in to make financial reports every month.

Stacey Feldman: [00:27:28] Yeah, it was, it was definitely wrong when we first did it I'll say that. But I think this is a really intriguing topic because what I've found is that there's this misconception for founders and non accountants non-finance folks around, like what it takes to get that right. I mean, you have inventory, cash, R and product sales, all of those pieces are very intertwined to get correct. And that's why inventory accounting can be so complex for us. With QuickBooks, I remember it was much easier with the wholesale mom and pop shops because they'd place an order, we'd create a sales order in QuickBooks manually, enter all of the products, convert that to a invoice once it shipped, send that invoice to the customer and hopefully they click to pay within the QuickBooks portal.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:22] And you had the Cogs in QuickBooks. So it just all that flowed.

Stacey Feldman: [00:28:26] I'm trying to remember if we had the the cogs in QuickBooks, we didn't actually at that time because our inventory was not maintained in QuickBooks. It was in that external spreadsheet sheets that that maintained our inventory and costing. So what we did is on a monthly basis is we summarize the cost per unit across different units and we booked a journal entry to estimate cost of sales. And I don't think we were materially off by the time we went on to the ERP. And you know, when you go to an ERP, you need to upload all of your inventory, your inventory, subledger your items at a particular cost, which will result in a gross inventory value. And then you compare that gross inventory value to what you have in your external spreadsheets. Hopefully that number is not too far off compared to your physical accounts that you're physically uploading. And I don't remember us having a major adjustment for that, which was very impressive.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:19] Yeah, I mean, that's great, right? Like, that means you did it, right? Because you did it in the cheapest, easiest way and you got close enough.

Stacey Feldman: [00:29:28] That's fair. I mean, for us, it was, it was great because high quantity of volumes, but a very low cost. So, you know, the risk wasn't too high.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:38] And this is, I think, a potential pitfall for anyone who loves accounting. Technology is we really want to set up the system so that we're costing every single individual item. And every time we make a sale, we've got a cost associated with that sale. And it sounds really fun and it sounds great in theory, but then actually implementing something like that for a high volume business is insanely difficult.

Stacey Feldman: [00:30:02] Right? And when you're talking about a startup and you're thinking about priorities. My priority as an accountant within a startup was not getting to the penny. It was making sure we invoiced customers right. You know, it's a very different mindset around what's important. And as we grew, we grew our team, we grew our focus. You know, eventually we went to a place where we were preparing for an IPO. That's when the pennies matter. That's when you need to work on process. But it's about identifying through the stages of the of the company growth. Where should be the focus.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:36] Yeah. Getting the money in the door right. Cash cash.

Stacey Feldman: [00:30:39] Flow, top.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:40] Focus. That's the top focus because you're not going to have an A job as an accountant. That's right. You're not going to get to the IPO unless you get cash in the door. That's right.

Stacey Feldman: [00:30:48] So your question then was around the different sales channels how we recorded sales?

Blake Oliver: [00:30:55] Well, so some of you were invoicing in QuickBooks, right? But then were.

Stacey Feldman: [00:30:58] Invoicing.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:59] Shopify and Amazon. Did you bring in all the individual orders or did you just summarize?

Stacey Feldman: [00:31:04] We so initially, which was very wrong for Shopify, is we received a payment from Shopify. This was before I knew really anything about accounting and we recorded that payment.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:16] To be fair, this was your first job?

Stacey Feldman: [00:31:17] Very fair. Yeah, and I was the most equipped at the time to do this, so you know, it it's in the past. But so we get deposits and we record those deposits to revenue, which, you know, that's all wrong, but we were just cash basis recording sales initially from Shopify. And then what that grew to was both Amazon and Shopify. I was booking journal entries on a monthly basis based on the units that we were selling. And, you know, when we talk about like reporting, for example, it was very hard for us to answer the question, How many pop grips did you sell this year because of the way that we were selling the product across many different channels you have it might be sold in a six pack. It might be sold in a carton, it might be sold under the one on one, it might be sold as a promotional product. All of your SKUs that are living your stock, keeping units, your items that you're selling kind of have a different measure of or what was the word I'm looking for? So the unit of measure, everyone has a different unit of measure.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:23] There are different SKUs too, right? You can't just sum up all of them.

Stacey Feldman: [00:32:27] That's right. And for Sam's Club, for example, we sold one unit to them, but it was six pop grips. So you have to kind of extend out. And without an inventory software, without an MRP, to tell you that the lowest level of measure, a unit of measure is a grip. And running a report, it was a very complicated process to build a lookup table that says this skew is six pop grips, two pop grips and whatever else is in that unit packaging and have a lookup table that then you can say, okay, this is how many pop grips we sold. And that became evident when we went through a quality earnings report or we needed to do an audit and maturing to say, okay, this is important. I never looked at it this way, so let's start to shift our mentality around how we're building the infrastructure of our products in the system and try to start to shift that over time.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:25] Which was still the spreadsheet.

Stacey Feldman: [00:33:27] Which was still the spreadsheet for Cogs, but for revenue, what we started to do was book units sales at zero cost. So we had at least some sales data but not costing costing piece, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:33:41] Because before, when you weren't costing in the accounting system in QuickBooks, you were just putting in a number for the order, not the quantity sold.

Stacey Feldman: [00:33:50] Yeah. Or it would have a quantity of what they were purchasing and the sell price that.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:56] Wouldn't line up with how many actual pop grips.

Stacey Feldman: [00:33:59] That's right. We didn't have consistency across products or sales channels. And I think that's a common thing when you have startups and you're selling your product in a bundle or a mix or you're having, you know, whatever your customer really wants, you know, a founder or an early stage company is not going to think about how should I build up my costing model to make sure I can build reports that are valuable to me as an owner? Right.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:22] Well, you have to really think ahead when you're designing your systems to know that I'm going to need this number someday. I'm going to need to be able to tell somebody I sold this many pop grips in this period across all of the different ways that we sell it. So I bet that's something that now if you went back and did it again, you would totally set it up that way. Knowing what you know now, which.

Stacey Feldman: [00:34:44] Is I've taken so much of that knowledge now into the subsequent companies that I've gone to at Sunday, Sundays very new as well, been around for about four years now. So we're answering similar questions and there's different complexities because we are doing much more manufacturing at Sunday, but we're able to. We have that forward looking perspective. There's a lot of people on Sunday who have come from startups and are trying to build out the infrastructure for growth.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:12] So we're on the topic of mistakes. And you mentioned in preparation for this episode that Popsockets made a $14 million mistake. So I'd love to learn about that so that our listeners can avoid making a similar mistake when it comes to CPG.

Stacey Feldman: [00:35:32] Sure. And CPG accounting, it's very important to have an operational mindset. You need to be hand in hand with the supply chain team, understand the operations, how you how you build your product, how you store your product, how you sell your product, so you can translate that information to the financials. It's a different mindset than a lot of SaaS companies. It's much more ingrained in detail. And part of that is working with your R&D team, your new product development and your sales team and making sure you know, if your product development team is kind of tweaking the way we we manufacture a product or swapping out, let's say, a chemical or an ingredient, let's say, in Sunday's case. How then are you going to sell through your existing inventory? You have inventory that you're selling to customers on hand, maybe some in store. It's important to think about the overall impact of. The life cycle of products. And with Popsockets case, what we did was we had three components the base, the middle accordion structure and then the top. And we changed that to be an integrated accordion with the top so they don't come apart anymore. Again, simplifying that supply chain and that previously.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:46] Previously you wanted them to come apart so you could customize them. That's right.

Stacey Feldman: [00:36:50] And now it's much more simplified where they're together, but they also are swappable. So we wanted people to be able to mix and match, take them off, put a new one on, and that swap ability is just a new product that we wanted to offer to our customers. I think the biggest mistake that Popsockets made was not having a clear plan in how to roll out that new product offering across all channels. So it's easy to switch that online. You say that sell through the existing inventory, then we'll list the new product type and market it and we'll have that available on our website. But when you're talking about millions of products that are in Walmart, Target, Amazon, any cellular provider, Verizon, we had a lot of product in market already and what we decided to do was, you know, this was a conscious mistake that, you know, I don't think was executed very well. But we decided we're going to take back all that inventory that's on shelf and we're going to have a clean execution of this new product line that needs to now be in market. And it you know, we had forecasts for what we expected to sell through before that cut off date across our key customers. And those forecasts changed over time. You know, we thought our risk of loss was much lower than what it actually was once we were ready to pull those returns back from the stores.

Stacey Feldman: [00:38:16] I mean, if you're trying to pull product back from Target, for example, it's not just the cost of the product that you're taking back. It's all of the fees for them to get staffing, to get the logistic ICS, to get the shipping, they're going to charge you to get make that happen. So swapping out the product in store was a very costly. Endeavor for us. And I think if we had had a different plan that allowed us to promote sell through work with the customers and kind of have a more flexible timeline on when we're going to shift that product to the new newest innovation of that product. We would have saved a lot of money. And that I mean, that came off of top line revenue. So I think my recommendation for companies as they're, you know, sending new products and innovating, it's really think about the full life cycle and make sure it's a conscious effort with proper metrics and data of how it's going to get into market and how to take back the old version of that product. Because what happens then is you have that product on hand and now is it obsolete now that you have a new version? Would it have been better if you had sold through it? Because now you have an inventory adjustment item here that you have an obsolescence for?

Blake Oliver: [00:39:27] And and why did you or why did Popsockets decide to do that hard switch over and take back that old stuff? Was was the new version that much better?

Stacey Feldman: [00:39:38] I think that was the the thought among leadership at the time that it was that much better and that we wanted the marketing to be aligned and we wanted this new era of, of popgrips, I think just opinions.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:53] Yeah. So it basically it sounded better in theory than it ended up being in practice. There's a lot of logistics, a lot of expenses to go with it. Did you end up selling the the older version?

Stacey Feldman: [00:40:06] The on hand.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:07] Items or is there a landfill somewhere with like, you know, $10 million of popsockets in it?

Stacey Feldman: [00:40:13] I think that it could have been executed a little bit better with some. Yeah, yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:19] You know, there's a famous story about like a landfill with a bunch of Nintendo entertainment system games, right? Because that's a similar kind of idea when they didn't sell the product. What do you do with it?

Stacey Feldman: [00:40:30] I'd play those now. I'd buy one.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:32] Yeah, Right now they're worth if if somebody can find it, they're worth like millions of dollars. So. Well let's let's talk about customer discounts as well. Right. So we talked about cost, we talked about revenue, but then there's discounts which really eats into your revenue. What what lessons do you have for us in that in that regard?

Stacey Feldman: [00:40:53] Customer discounts in CPG are pretty standard. When you're direct to consumer, you have a discount on your website, you can record that. That's fine. Where it gets really complicated is with trade deductions, with big box retailers or wholesalers and distributors. So we're talking the big stores of the world Target, Walmart, Home Depot, Verizon, big stores where you buy product, there's a we don't know whether it's truth or not, but there is a sentiment that it's a revenue center for these big stores to charge back customers for all certain sorts of type of things as they sell the product. So some examples of that are when you contractually sign on with, let's say, Lowe's, for example, they're going to say, okay, we're going to take a 2% early payment deduction. We're going to take a 1.5% marketing allowance. We're going to take a 1.8% defective allowance. And I think that's those are typically like defective marketing and prompt pay, early pay discounts.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:58] That's starting to add up.

Stacey Feldman: [00:41:59] They're starting to add up. So those are usually baked in. I want to say industry averages. I, I'd say upwards of 5% or higher contractually. And so what that does for them is they say if they get a product in and it's damaged or it's defective, then they have this allowance to play with to help customers or replace it or what have you, or market the product in store. And, you know, those those are one thing. It becomes very complicated on an accounting side of things because, you know, we want costs to match revenue. And so you want to try to accrue for those costs at time of sell in some systems and softwares allow you to bake those costs into the sales order itself where you can have a line on the sales order that computes that 1.8% deduction or whatever's contractually required. Some systems have that. That's great. I recommend those when you know it's 100% guaranteed to be deducted. Where it gets more complicated is when they use this as a revenue center, as I said earlier, where we'll get a deduction that says paid in full or what do they say, a deduction for ship and full. So you didn't give us all the product. And so then we have to go through and say, here's the bowl, here's it's signed, here's proof of delivery that you got what we said we gave you. And sometimes they'll then reverse that deduction that they had already taken.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:24] So this is when they pay the invoice, they take the deduction. When they make the payment. That's right. And and then you have to go and decide, do we fight this or do we just accept it?

Stacey Feldman: [00:43:34] That's right. And for most small companies, you accept it because you have no people to dispute it or even know what that means. What does that charge even mean? Right. So for an accounting perspective, you know, it's a very, very complicated process and trying to estimate and accrue for these type of fines. Obviously, you don't want to expect to have these type of fines. You are assuming you're shipping in full. But when the payments come in, there's always thousands of dollars, no matter how good your supply chain and fulfillment is. So if you have the staff and we were working through this at Sunday right now, we've actually brought in an external team to help us dispute all of these charges. We've got over $400,000 of disputes across three customers that we're just having them collect bills, collect pods, upload them to the portals which are so archaic for these big customers and try to dispute them to get them to be reversed.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:37] Yeah, I guess once you get to a certain scale, it makes sense to hire people to do that because if you don't dispute it, you're losing, you know, a lot of revenue, right? That's that's, that's off the top line right there. Or the bottom line, really.

Speaker3: [00:44:52] Yeah.

Stacey Feldman: [00:44:53] Like I popped off because we had a full time person who that was her full role was deductions and dispute management.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:00] Wow. So, okay, good to know. Something you definitely have to consider when you go when you make deals with those bigger companies that you're going to have. Just basically what would you rule of thumb like 5% off the top there, that kind of.

Stacey Feldman: [00:45:15] Stuff? I'd say 10 to 12% for all in.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:19] With the cost of the people to dispute it and everything like that. No, no. Then it's even.

Stacey Feldman: [00:45:23] Even the deductions. Yeah. Okay.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:26] Yeah. So it's funny. It's like you got to really think about when you're, when you're starting a business, the margin has to be, you know, like you said, if you have small margins working with these, working with Amazon or with a big box retailer is going to be really tough because they eat into so much more margin.

Speaker4: [00:45:45] Mhm.

Stacey Feldman: [00:45:45] It's food and beverage is one of the most difficult industries to succeed in. Yeah, it's very difficult and you know, there's software providers that help like I mentioned to you vividly, is one that helps manage this process. I haven't used them myself, but I'm interested to get to know that more. But food and Bev is tough. It's a tough industry.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:07] What about, you know, so at Popsockets you had a fairly simple manufacturing process in the sense that, you know, at the beginning you had these different components. You'd get them shipped from China, you'd put them together to customize for the customer, send it out. Eventually you simplified that until you were pretty much just manufacturing or just receiving the finished goods and then distributing those at your current company at Sunday. It sounds like you're doing a lot more of the manufacturing, putting the ingredients together. Would that be considered full manufacturing?

Stacey Feldman: [00:46:41] I would consider Sunday to be a light manufacturing company. Okay. Because what's the.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:46] Help me understand the difference.

Stacey Feldman: [00:46:47] I don't know if these are industry wide. These are my conceptual understandings of of them, but I'd say turnkey popsockets. Full manufacturing would be. You are sourcing the absolute raw materials from. Let's say if you're going to make a pen, it's the plastic, it's the ink. You're then building a mold to mold it into that shape and then eventually selling that unit. But what Sunday does is we purchase a lot of those raw materials and formulations for our product from other companies. So we'll purchase the formulation of what we're putting into the into the the packaging. We'll also purchase the packaging. We'll assemble those units together in the system physically and in the system to be, you know, a formulation packaging cap and then we'll ship that to another facility to put it into a bigger box and with other products that need to also be put together, then we'll send that to our three and our three will send it out to customers. So got it. I consider that light manufacturing where it's more focused on assemblies rather than the actual manufacturing of raw materials into finished goods.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:01] And what system are you using to track all that at Sunday?

Stacey Feldman: [00:48:05] We are using deer inventory systems, which I'd never heard of before coming to Sunday. I'd say it's comparable to a fishbowl inventory Software integrates with QuickBooks Online, which we are still on QuickBooks as well, so it has its pros and cons. I would say that any inventory system or any ERP system is only as good as the inputs of that system. You know, we talk giga garbage in, garbage out across any accounting software. I think it's even more prevalent for inventory.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:37] Yeah. Yeah. Well, so you're doing the light manufacturing, so that means you've got to get the cost of each of those components into your deer inventory system. And then I guess so you're buying the ingredients and then you're mixing.

Stacey Feldman: [00:48:53] We are not mixing. You're not mixing the formula. They're buying the ingredients or our suppliers buying the ingredients. They're mixing. We're buying the formulation that's already mixed and ready to be filled into the bags that we sell.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:04] Okay. Got it. So you're getting like vats of the the the what do you call it? The formulation.

Stacey Feldman: [00:49:11] Fertilization. It's fertilizer. Fertilizer. It's liquid fertilizer. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:14] So you're getting liquid fertilizer in bulk. Does it come in big? You know, big vats or bags? How do you get it?

Stacey Feldman: [00:49:21] I think I know I haven't seen it myself. I think we buy it by the. I don't know what the wait is that we buy it in pounds, let's say. Okay. And then we have them fill it into those bags that we purchase. So.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:35] Got it. Oh, so you send them the bags, they fill it into the bags and they send you and then so they send you the bags and then you add the labels.

Stacey Feldman: [00:49:43] In the caps and anything else that's going on to.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:46] It. Everything else that goes into it. Got it. So you have to get all that cost into dear inventory.

Stacey Feldman: [00:49:51] And in some circumstances we have to get the actual cost of filling. So their service cost to do the filling for us. And that's one piece of cost accounting that you can you can have standard costing where you estimate how much that cost is going to be. You have a standard cost in your system that applies that and then you review your standards variances on a monthly basis to see this is how much they charge us, this is how much the system said they should have charged us. And here's the the variance. What we do because we have a more flexible inventory system is we build as we build those assemblies in the system, we apply the actual true cost to those assemblies. That way we don't have a variance to work through and we know it's accurate. The complication that that causes is we're delayed, we're behind where we get the invoice once a month, then we build the assemblies and then we're able to sell that assembly in the system. So it's a real time issue for closing the books because we're not a real time inventory processing in the system. So let's say for example, we.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:58] Have.

Stacey Feldman: [00:50:59] That would help. We have all of these sales orders that we shipped out to Lowe's in the month, for example, and or even direct to consumer, whichever sales you have to your customers, you want to post a sales order. When you go to post that sales order, it says you can't because you don't have inventory available. Well, you know, you did have inventory available because you shipped it out. So that means that something didn't get assembled or built in the system. And it's because our team hadn't gotten the invoice from the vendor that says this is the cost that we charged you.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:29] So because you're using actual costs.

Stacey Feldman: [00:51:31] Yeah, that's right. So it's something we're working through is to figure out, do we add standards, do we completely change up our supply chain to simplify it, like we talked about earlier, that we don't have to do these steps, that we can have a turnkey solution where we're buying that finished good from the supplier rather than having to build these assemblies because it is a lot of overhead and time to manage these steps throughout the process.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:54] Yeah. Both for the actual physical assembly and then the accounting of it as well. Yeah.

Stacey Feldman: [00:51:59] And then you just go ahead.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:02] No, no, please.

Stacey Feldman: [00:52:03] Well I was going to switch topics to say and then you get to a place where you're ready for an audit and you need to perform a physical count and compare across. We've have 13 different locations that have physical product in different stages and compare that physical to what our system is showing.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:21] So what else? Dear Inventory. That's a pretty cool app. I've encountered it myself once. I know it's been around for a while. What other cutting edge technology or just interesting tech? Are you using it Sunday that you want to share?

Stacey Feldman: [00:52:36] One of the things that's been really interesting to me at Sunday and kind of changing my conception of accounting is that Sundays built their own website back end. We have a large engineering and tech team who's very talented and if you go to get sunday.com, they built all of that which means we're not on Shopify, we're not on Squarespace. And it allows us to really sell the product how we want to sell it to our customers and own that process. But what it also enables is all of this data and metrics to be housed in a data warehouse on top of this website. I think we're using Snowflake to compile everything and we're using Looker as a reporting kind of bi tool to pull in all these metrics and data. And basically what it allows you to do is you have all this sales data on our website pulling into this database and everyone can see to the minute what we're selling, how we're selling it, how the customer is performing, not having to even think about accounting and how accounting is looking at this data to get results and have real time reporting. So they're kind of circumventing the GL and the sales data that we record to make real time decisions, which on the one hand takes a lot of pressure off the accounting team because, you know, we're not trying to speed up clothes or have issues. And but on the other hand, it is complicated because I'm constantly trying to make sure that the data they're reporting is the same data we're going to report for sales data on an ongoing basis. What the financials are truly going to say. Right.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:09] Because if if your leadership is looking at this data with Looker and it doesn't match what you're producing with the accounting system, then they're going to have questions, right? So you've got to get it to match.

Speaker4: [00:54:20] That's right. Interesting.

Stacey Feldman: [00:54:21] And it's brought up a really cool concept for me where, you know, I haven't had much tech. Are in my career, which I'm starting to get more SaaS exposure. And I'm like, Wow, this is great. This is easy. But when we think about the fact that the tech team has built the website, they've coded it, it's all their code and that their code is generating a sales dollar. This is how much you sold. And we're using that dollar to book in our financial statements. How do we as accountants audit that? How do I know that their code is correct, that it's accurate and that I can trust it? It's been a really cool process for me. I didn't know how to do it. We've gotten to a much better place. We hired a head of data and analytics who is phenomenal. But what I've done is we have a lot of deferred revenue because we're a subscription based product. We collect cash for most orders up front, and I roll forward deferred revenue. It's cash collected minus refunds, minus revenue recognized equals deferred revenue. Very basic. And as I roll that forward and I compare to Stripe, which is our cash collections, which I know is true, I know Stripe tells me the right number of cash collected, and I know they tell me how much was refunded and then they have my revenue and then I have my deferred revenue and I'm like $600,000 off. So to me that indicates something in this data and code is wrong. So that's been the most recent project that we've worked through. We just finalized it to get that variance down to prove that, hey, there was something wrong in the code and it was allocating revenue in this way incorrectly. We fixed it. Here's the new reporting.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:59] Well, that's great. I mean, you're providing a lot of value there as the accountant, you know, making sure that that top line number that's really important is correct by by reconciling it to the cash.

Speaker4: [00:56:11] I know.

Stacey Feldman: [00:56:11] It's a really exciting thing for accountants, for sure.

Speaker4: [00:56:14] I'm sure the.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:15] Developers love you.

Stacey Feldman: [00:56:17] They're like, it's immaterial. 1%, 1% is $600,000. I can't adjust revenue that high.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:24] Yeah, 1% of revenue is a lot of profit.

Speaker4: [00:56:26] That's right. Right.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:27] Got to explain that to them. That's that's really fascinating. So, okay, so you've got the custom built website producing a sales number and that sales number is not tied to cash in any way. So you're basically tying it out to the cash. Could you see a way to like, you know, program there? I mean, guess if you did this, you'd basically be building an ERP, so maybe it's not worth it, but you could tie out their their number two right to the cash somehow.

Stacey Feldman: [00:56:52] Yeah. And that's what we're doing. And that's been my thought. So we're integrating Stripe data in all my avalara tax data because that's a component of it as well. And I've basically given them this framework that I need them to build in Looker so I can have a report that rolls forward my deferred revenue for me and tells me that ending balance based on the data inputs that are from third party sources and the the revenue data. So I mean, this is because we have such a talented tech team, I can't praise them enough to be able to go through and actually build this. But it's got my brain going like so exciting to think about, like when I think about tech. There's got to be so much happening in public company big audits that. You know, our numbers are relied on and auditors aren't coders. We're not you know, this isn't our background. And it's got me thinking, you know, what are we missing in big public companies? Talk about FTX and things like that.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:54] Oh, it's a lot because the auditors are generally not involved in any of this until it's way too late. And yeah.

Speaker4: [00:58:02] Fascinating.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:03] It is fascinating. I actually was on the Cloud Accounting podcast. David Lowery and I talked to the CFO of Crumbl cookies at the last NetSuite conference. Yeah. And they they're so interesting because, I don't know, would you call them CPG, their food, right. Their cookies.

Speaker4: [00:58:21] Food. And Bev is.

Stacey Feldman: [00:58:22] A component of CPG. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:23] Okay. So what was fascinating to me about what what Crumbl did is, you know, Crumble was founded in silicon on the silicon slopes by a tech guy who decided I don't like any of the point of sale systems out there, so I'm just going to build my own. And so they're not using Shopify, they're not using Square. They have their own custom point of sale system and they've worked with their CFO in a way that allows them to actually get useful financial information right out of it. And they get good costing and all the stores are using it too. It's like every every cookie that's made goes through this system. Oh, wow. And so they they know exactly their margin on everything. Right? And that's the dream. But to do that with like an ERP system would be hard because you've got to like make a general purpose ERP fit your process. Right? They built their system to fit their process from the beginning so you can actually ensure that the numbers are right. And it kind of sounds like that's the path you're on.

Stacey Feldman: [00:59:22] Yeah, it's very similar. I mean, the reporting capabilities alone are, to your point with crumble. I mean, they can probably see all of their metrics real time and that's so valuable for leadership to make decisions. Whereas waiting for a lot of CPGs are waiting 15, 30 days later to even know how they performed. It takes another 15 to 30 days to communicate that to everyone, to even start to make a change based on that data that happened so long ago.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:53] Yeah, I love the idea of taking the pressure off the accounting team to close the books just so they can get those operational numbers right. It it shouldn't have to rely on the financial statements to do that.

Stacey Feldman: [01:00:04] I agree. But then I'm thinking. Is that kind of removing the importance of the accounting function? Because to get my inventory to be accurate, like no one cares at all about that except for me and the accounting team, that everything reconciles and everything's correct. Yeah, the business still needs to make those decisions. So it's finding a balance to allow the accounting team to close it and not have material adjustments, but have confidence that these numbers are accurate, but also give the company the real time data. And I think. Having a data warehouse is incredibly important to feed, information to analyze. We talk a lot about or hear a lot about CFOs who are now adopting the data function in companies. That's exactly what our VP of Finance has done. He took the data and analytics team. We're housed under one big organization with that's forcing now is that the finance numbers need to tie to the accounting, need to tie to the data numbers. And without having that in one house, it kind of segregates everyone to report different information.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:12] That's so important. Really. Yeah. Accounting, finance and data. That's what it's that's what the team should be now. And God, it makes me think of another interview I did with one of the co-founders of Peloton. And his reaction was, Yeah, so Graham from Peloton, like they had a half failed ERP implementation basically because it sounds like the data team for operational metrics and the accounting people who were doing the accounting implementation were not on the same page. Right. It's so important data. I mean, and if you think about it, you know, as accountants, why should we be limited to just financial information, right? Operational data. Like if we can quantify it, we can count it. That's accounting, right?

Speaker4: [01:01:58] So that's why.

Stacey Feldman: [01:02:00] You know, especially for CPG, it's so hand in hand with the ops team, the supply chain team, you can't have one without the other. And to be successful.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:09] Well, Stacy, this has been so much fun. I've learned so much from you. If our listeners would like to follow you online, what's the best place for them to do that?

Stacey Feldman: [01:02:20] I'm starting to be a lot more active on LinkedIn, so please reach out on LinkedIn. I'd love to connect with folks more.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:27] Search for Stacy Feldman, CPA on LinkedIn. We'll have the link to your profile in the show notes. And I have to say I've been pretty happy with like the improvements they've been making to LinkedIn. It's it's it's still spammy, right? You still got to deal with the people who are sending you those unsolicited messages all the time. But it's gotten a lot better. And as Twitter has sort of just caught fire, I feel like a lot of people are moving to LinkedIn these days for meaningful conversations. So great. Well, our listeners can also connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm Blake Oliver, CPA. Do listen to other episodes of the earmark podcast. Go to podcast, earmark cpcomm. And don't forget you can earn CPE for listening today. This is our first CPG CPE. So thank you, Stacy. Download the earmark app for Apple or Android devices and someday soon we're going to have a desktop version as well. So I know people are excited for that. So, Stacy, thanks again.

Stacey Feldman: [01:03:24] Great talking to you. Keep it up.