CASE STUDY
Sweet Mickie
Sector: Retail
Size: Medium
Service: Bookkeeping with Payroll
In 2015, Emma left her corporate career to pursue her passion for baking; she started a Melbourne-based company producing gift cookies featuring customisable (and often cheeky!) quotes. The idea of sending messages to friends, family, employees and co-workers via cookies proved very popular, and Emma soon upgraded her operation to a commercial kitchen and shopfront, and took on a number of staff members.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic happened. Emma’s business took off, with a huge increase in locked-down customers wanting to send gift cookies to each other during lockdown. Soon enough, the business was growing faster than you can say ‘cookie dough’.
What they needed help with
Emma’s existing manual financial systems were suitable for a smaller operation – but she couldn’t scale them with the rapid growth of the business and the increased costs that came with higher rent and more employees. She was having to spend days on reconciliation and payroll, and was rushing to hit key lodgement dates, all when she really needed to be leading her business. She also had no visibility of her financial position or profitability; she was in desperate need of timely and accurate data that she could base key business decisions on.
iKeep’s solution
We worked closely with Emma and her existing accountant to find the right solution for her business. Together, we came to the decision that our mid-tier product would give her the financial visibility she needed at an affordable monthly cost.
iKeep’s automated/cloud-based services have taken the stress out of the payroll and lodgements processes – buying back Emma’s time so she can spend more time with customers and the baking team.
The biggest benefit of iKeep’s solution comes from our daily reconciliation and coding of her bank transactions through Xero. Emma is finally confident that she has an up-to-date picture of her financial positions – and most importantly her cashflow position.
This information empowers her to make decisions about the business – pricing, product offering and new products – based on sound financial information, rather than the guessing game it had been before.
To assist Emma even further, we introduced our monthly Fathom graphic management reporting pack – which helps make the data even more digestible for Emma’s creative mind.
Key benefits
- Automating previously manual and time-consuming processes – freeing up time for the business owner
- Providing daily bank reconciliations – providing visibility of the business’s financial position and empowering evidence-based decision making
- Easy-to-understand monthly management reporting – finding ways to help a creative quicky digest financial information
