Retail finance performance intelligence
Connecting sales, margin, cost, and cash flow into one board-ready operating picture.
Built for a growing multi-channel retailer that needed to move beyond spreadsheet-led P&L reporting and into a live operating model — giving finance, commercial, and leadership teams one consistent view of performance across channels, categories, and cost centres.
Featured result
Time saved per cycle
3 days → 4 hours
KPI domains
Revenue, margin, cost, cash
Primary audience
Board, finance, commercial
Client context
Multi-channel retail business
Engagement
Finance dashboard design, P&L modelling, commercial KPI architecture
Timeline
5-week build and integration
The challenge
Finance reporting was built on a patchwork of Excel models that took days to prepare and were out of date before they reached the board.
Sales, margin, cost, and cash data lived in separate systems with no consistent definitions — so every meeting started with a debate about the numbers.
The business lacked the commercial KPI structure to understand which channels, categories, and cost centres were actually driving profitability.
What was delivered
The solution
Defined a unified commercial KPI framework covering gross revenue, net revenue, gross margin, contribution margin, operating cost, and EBITDA by channel and category.
Built a board-ready P&L dashboard with executive summary, channel drill-down, category mix analysis, and cost centre variance views.
Automated the monthly finance pack generation by connecting the dashboard model to live source data — eliminating the manual compilation cycle.
Business impact
The monthly finance pack dropped from three days of manual work to four hours of automated generation and review.
Leadership gained a consistent, source-of-truth view of profitability across all channels and categories for the first time.
Finance and commercial teams moved from defending numbers to discussing strategy — because the data was already agreed before the meeting started.
The story behind the work
The core problem
The issue was not a lack of data. It was that the same metric meant different things to different teams. Gross margin, net revenue, and contribution margin were all calculated differently depending on who was presenting — so every leadership meeting lost the first twenty minutes to reconciliation.
What the solution delivered
The engagement started with defining a single set of commercial KPIs that every team agreed on. Once the definitions were locked, the dashboard built itself around them — and the monthly pack became a report rather than a project.
The downstream value
When a finance team stops spending three days compiling a pack and starts spending that time on analysis, the quality of commercial decisions improves quickly. This was the most consistent feedback from the leadership team six months after go-live.
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