Fashion Brand Case Study – Böhme

Meet Böhme

Bohme is a by-women-for-women, boho-style clothing and accessory brand with an international ecommerce presence and several store locations across the western United States.

The following includes quotes from a conversation with Forrest Allen, Head of Accounting at Böhme:

The Situation

Before Bookkeep, manual data entry was an arduous yet necessary task for Böhme.

“Prior to working with Bookkeep, we would go in and pull the reports from Shopify and then create manual entries in QuickBooks to account for each of the types of transactions.”

It was a process that quickly became a serious bottleneck when it was time to scale.

“We had to do it manually and for every location that we had in Shopify. So, we would make multiple entries every day and then a lot of the payments were not matching up as well because we didn’t understand how the breakdown was and when to expect them.”

The Problem

Hours of manual accounting work per year

260

Pages in each monthly statement

300

Bank accounts and credit cards to reconcile

20

Originally, Böhme was spending about 1 hour every single day (260 hours per year) just on tedious daily accounting tasks.

“We did have a process set up where we could use templates which sped the process up quite a bit, but it still required somebody pulling the report every day and looking at each location… it was probably close to 1 hour a day”

Böhme—a widespread brick-and-mortar and ecommerce brand—encounters a 300 page statement every month.

“Before, at the end of the month, I would try to reconcile and I’ve never been able to reconcile with paypal…. We’ve struggled all along to reconcile the clearing account against the payments”

As they continued to scale, the company began juggling 15 to 20 separate bank accounts and credit cards that they needed to reconcile precisely, every day. Moreover, there were clearing accounts to reconcile.

“We have about 15 or 20 bank accounts and credit cards that we reconcile daily to the penny. And (finally) when those can reconcile to the penny, but I can’t get things like the clearing accounts to reconcile. That’s bothersome.”

Due to lack of accounting transparency and organization, missed payments were an elusive and frustrating yet common experience.

“We had 3 or 4 transactions that where we were expecting the payment to come in and… we missed the payment. It never showed up and we contacted Bookkeep and we also contacted Shopify… we were able to catch that and see that we had missed payments and we would not have been able to have done that if we weren’t using the system the way Bookkeep has it.”

The Solution

Integrations Used

• Shopify
• Paypal

Accounting Platforms

• QuickBooks Online

With Bookkeep’s Shopify to QuickBooks and PayPal to QuickBooks integrations, Böhme is saving countless hours of time-consuming, menial accounting work and receiving automated daily summaries instead.

“[Bookkeep] is saving me a lot of steps to identify the different transactions and be able to summarize what’s happening every day and put it in. So it gives us a little more detail to, to work with on the reconciliation.”

Bookkeep was able to bring transparency, consolidation, and efficiency to Böhme’s once-cumbersome accounting practices.

“[Bookkeep]’s brought a lot of clarity to what we’re doing to help match the deposits against the expected amounts to make—to give purpose to that clearing account. This has allowed all of the payments now to actually match against another number that we anticipated—that the payment would be there.”

The Result

In brief, Böhme appreciates the confidence Bookkeep gives them surrounding their accounting system.

“I would just simply recommend [Bookkeep] because of the confidence that it gives when your transactions are posted and it tells me to expect a payment and then the payment comes in that, that boosts my confidence. I’ve never been able to reconcile the clearing accounts and I would like to be able to do that and we’re closer now than we’ve ever been.”

They also recognize Bookkeep’s unique ability to handle sales tax, especially for other large ecommerce brands, like Böhme.

“There’s always a question in there of how do I do sales tax? How do I do sales tax? And if it’s a company that looks like they are fairly sizable, then I usually refer them to [Bookkeep] because I think it would benefit them. When you don’t know anything about sales tax, you can really be lost trying to figure it out.”

Lastly, their experience with Bookkeep’s customer service team has been outstanding.

“I would say [Bookkeep’s customer service] is excellent. It was very impressive. The last interaction that I had with them, they were able to dive into PayPal and they knew exactly where to go for every transaction to explore it and find out what’s going on. They were very knowledgeable. It was quite impressive, really impressive.”