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About Public Rec

Public Rec is a popular, digitally-native apparel brand that designs and sells comfortable athleisure for men. With a mission to make comfort look good, Public Rec is a go-to destination for men looking for modern and effortless style.

The Challenges

As Public Rec's Finance Director, Brad Schroeder manages financial operations, forecasting, budgeting, and the month-end close. The growing ecommerce brand, with annual revenue in the multi-millions and a lean team of 27, encountered challenges managing finances across online platforms.

The Reason Why

Prior to discovering Blue Onion, Public Rec outsourced their accounting to a third-party firm. Under Brad's leadership, they aimed to streamline by internalizing operations due to rising costs from manual reconciliation across payment processors. Though accurate, the process was time-consuming, hard to scale, inflexible to strategy updates, and financially unsustainable.

Implementing Blue Onion 

The shift to Blue Onion marked a pivotal moment for Public Rec. Blue Onion, powered by machine learning algorithms, streamlines processes without requiring manual rule writing. Its proprietary data algorithms automatically detect, integrate, clean, and match data across systems, ensuring efficient order-to-cash reconciliation. Public Rec's financial team collaborated with Blue Onion's experts to optimize their accounting workflow for handling mixed payment methods. Blue Onion's software directly connects with Public Rec's bank, Shopify, and NetSuite, transforming their reconciliation process.

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Transforming Public Rec with Blue Onion

The implementation of Blue Onion's solution led to remarkable improvements for Public Rec, specifically:

Time Savings

[ Reporting ]

Public Rec estimates they now save a minimum of 10 hours monthly on refunds and sales reporting. Brad emphasized the invaluable dynamic insights gained from navigating reporting.

“I think the best part is being able to drill up and down. If I see a report, I can click into the data and see what’s behind it. I can look from a transaction level and then see the roll up, or I can go the other way around. It’s probably been the best part of using the platform. Plus, I can see transactions in a journal entry format or a report too - and I can export the report!”

[ Order-to-Cash Reconciliation ]

Public Rec has also immensely benefited from transitioning their manual, labor-intensive reconciliation process to Blue Onion’s automated, real-time process. 

Blue Onion streamlines order-to-cash reconciliation using its proprietary data engine from order creation to bank payout. The solution integrates and auto-reconciles data from various systems, guaranteeing precision. User-friendly dashboards, ready-to-go journal entries, revenue statements, and detailed transaction-level reports all work seamlessly to create a comprehensive transaction-level overview.

Increased Accuracy

[ Identifying Discrepancies ] 

With Blue Onion, Public Rec has boosted their financial records' accuracy to 99.5%, eliminating manual processing and gaining the ability to review transactions in detail down to their original data points.

Brad also pointed out that Blue Onion is great when it comes to identifying discrepancies and errors.

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”Almost daily, I review payouts. For instance, if I come across a $300,000 Shopify payment payout with a $500 discrepancy, I can easily pinpoint the unreconciled transaction(s) causing the variance and reconcile them.” 

[ Identifying Errors ]

Additionally, Brad spoke on an experience recently where he spotted an error when looking in NetSuite with their data connector - customer deposits were incorrect.

“Blue Onion helps me actually identify issues. It’s kind of like an accounting error logging system.” 

Delving deeper into error identification has proven to be valuable, particularly when exploring deferred revenue.

‍“Blue Onion’s Deferred Revenue Waterfall Chart has been pretty cool. It actually helped us uncover an issue in our Shopify - an instance where a bunch of orders from a year ago that were actually outstanding and had not been shipped/fulfilled due to a cancellation and reorder mix-up.” 

Most notably, Brad emphasized the value of real-time data flow and error identification facilitated by Blue Onion, which has been instrumental in ensuring the accuracy of Public Rec’s revenue and financial statements.

"With Blue Onion, yes, I can close quickly. Yes, I can deposit my cash, but also I know that my revenue is correct." 

Bonus Benefit: Listening to Feedback

Apart from the other benefits highlighted, Brad also noted that the ongoing collaboration with Blue Onion is highly productive, with tangible enhancements being made to the product stemming directly from user feedback. 

“I think my favorite things about Blue Onion are 1.) the team - everyone I’ve worked with has been great - and 2.) any feedback given is actually taken and done or implemented. I feel like I’ve been able to give feedback and I’m already seeing it happen in the platform, which is awesome. It’s been cool to feel like I'm a part of helping build Blue Onion!"

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