The First 90 Days in eCommerce: Why New CFOs Must Set the Course Now
The Reality Check: What a New CFO Actually Finds
It’s week five. The new CFO of a growing eCommerce company has completed the introductory rounds, met the key stakeholders – and is now starting to really understand the numbers.
What they find: Shopify is running, as is the inventory tool. Finance works in a local accounting solution. In between: Excel. Three, sometimes four systems, each answering the same question differently.
They ask about the last month-end close. Four days, they are told. They ask why. That’s when the real conversation begins.
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„What surprises me in discovery calls every time: the new CFO walks in, asks about the month-end close – and finds out it takes four days. Then they ask why. And that’s when the real conversation starts. Because the answer is never a technical problem. It’s always a data problem that has quietly embedded itself over the years.“
Parth Virkud, Managing Director, Alta Via Consulting
The data problem has a name in this case: no shared single source of truth. Every system answers the same question through its own logic. Shopify knows orders. The inventory tool knows stock levels. Finance knows postings. But which number is right – and more importantly: which number can you actually trust?
This is not an exception. In growing eCommerce companies that have built their system landscape pragmatically, it is the norm.
Tech Debt Isn't an IT Problem – It's a Finance Risk
What CFOs often underestimate in this situation: the real risk doesn’t lie in individual tools. It lies in the lack of consistency between them.
- Shopify revenues that don’t match the General Ledger exactly.
- Stripe payouts that need to be manually reconciled against bank movements.
- Revenue recognition that’s handled differently depending on the system – at order, at shipment, or at payment.
- Month-end closes that don’t fail because of the complexity of the business, but because of the complexity of the data maintenance.
These are not IT problems. They are finance risks – for forecasting, for auditability, and by the time a funding round or investor entry arrives, for the credibility of the numbers altogether.
The technical term is tech debt. But what it actually means in day-to-day finance rarely shows up as a system error. It shows up in an experienced finance team spending the majority of its capacity making data trustworthy – instead of analysing it.
The First 90 Days: A CFO's System Audit Checklist
In den ersten 90 Tagen geht es nicht darum, sofort Systeme auszutauschen. Es geht darum, Klarheit zu gewinnen – über das, was tatsächlich funktioniert, und über das, was nur funktioniert, solange das Unternehmen nicht weiter wächst.
„The most important question a new CFO can ask in the first few weeks isn’t ‘what’s working well?’ – it’s ‘which number from which system do I actually believe?’ If they can’t get a clear answer to that, they know where to start.“
Parth Virkud, MD, Alta Via Consulting
Four questions help make the critical points visible early:
Question 1: What does the actual system landscape look like?
Not the documented one – the actual one. In most growing eCommerce companies, there are more operational systems in use than officially known. The key questions: which systems are genuinely business-critical? Where do data handoffs break down? Which processes run outside any system – in Excel, in CSV exports, in one person’s head?
That last point is the real scalability risk: processes that only work because a specific person knows how to hold them together.
Question 2: Are financial and inventory data truly consistent?
This question goes far beyond a simple revenue reconciliation. Typical problems arise on three levels:
At the gross level: do the order totals in the webshop match the receivables and revenues in the General Ledger?
At the fees level: have payments from providers like Stripe been correctly posted – including fees, refunds, and chargebacks?
At the timing level: is revenue recognised at order or at shipment? In eCommerce, this is not a minor detail – it is an audit and compliance point.
The same applies to inventory: do physical stock levels, the inventory system, and the GL values agree? Are there regular manual adjustments at month-end – and if so, why?
Question 3: Which processes don't scale?
Many processes work – until the company grows faster than the processes. The key stress questions: what happens at double the order volume? Which workflows break first under international expansion? Where does a process depend on one person who carries it in their head?
Particularly critical: processes whose functioning is not documented but person-dependent. In one project, a DTC brand needed almost two weeks for the month-end close — not because of missing data, but because central reconciliation processes depended entirely on individual employees.
Question 4: How quickly can reliable reports be produced?
Reporting problems often only surface under time pressure – at a board meeting, during due diligence, or at year-end. The core questions: how long does the monthly close actually take? How quickly are ad-hoc analyses possible? And is there a shared ‘single version of the truth’ – or does every department deliver its own number?
What the answers reveal
Individual manual workarounds are normal in growing companies and are not a warning sign on their own. It becomes critical when several of these problems occur simultaneously: slow closes, inconsistent revenue logic, manual reconciliations, and a lack of visibility into inventory and margins. At that point, the system landscape is no longer just inefficient – it is actively constraining scale.
From Reactive Reporting to Proactive Steering
When the audit checklist reveals structural data gaps, the real strategic question emerges: how should finance be working twelve months from now?
As long as teams spend the majority of their capacity on data cleansing, there is little room for what a CFO is actually there to do: scenario planning, forecasting, and strategic steering. The shift from reactive reporting to proactive financial intelligence is not a tool change. It is a structural decision about the data foundation on which finance is supposed to operate.
In integrated ERP setups, day-to-day work changes fundamentally: orders from the webshop flow directly into the system. Inventory data is centrally managed. Accounting processes run automatically. Finance teams can trace the relationship between revenues, payments, fees, and stock levels down to the transaction level – without assembling CSV exports.
This is exactly the point at which many companies recognise that additional reports no longer solve the problem. Because what is fragmented is not the reporting — it is the operational data foundation itself.
At Alta Via Consulting, we have specialised in NetSuite because hundreds of projects have shown us that a platform connecting finance and operations within a shared data model is what creates this structural foundation. That is not a neutral market observation – it is a conviction that comes from project experience.
The goal is not primarily system consolidation. What matters is the ability to make finance and operations steerable on a consistent data foundation.
„Many CFOs wait until the pain is great enough to ask the system question. What they overlook: the best time for this decision is not when the company is already at its limit – it’s six months before that, when there’s still space to think clearly. Build the roof when the sun is shining.“
Parth Virkud, Managing Director, Alta Via Consulting
Conclusion: The First 90 Days Set the Direction
Many structural problems in growing eCommerce companies stay invisible for a long time – until growth, internationalisation, or a funding round pushes existing processes beyond their limits.
The first 90 days are therefore not a grace period. They are the window in which a new CFO can examine the system landscape without political resistance – and in which decisions can be made before the next growth phase forces them.
Operational clarity first. Strategic decisions second. But the right question can be asked right now:
What capabilities does the finance organisation need to have in twelve months — and how much of that is already being constrained by the current system landscape today?
