Eleven stores, three online channels, one set of numbers each morning.

What was going wrong

The founder wanted one thing: to know what the brand had sold yesterday. Getting it meant three people exporting three reports. The store billing software gave one number. The two marketplaces gave their own, each with its own idea of when a sale counts and what happens to a return. The website gave a third. Nobody had ever made the three agree, and by the time they were pasted into one sheet the day was over.

Month-end was worse. It took most of a week, ran on one analyst’s spreadsheet, and produced numbers the finance team and the buying team each quietly distrusted. Returns were the sorest point: a marketplace return appeared weeks after the sale and in a different report, so the sales figure everyone had already acted on was wrong in a way nobody could see.

The buying decisions underneath were being made on that. A city was reordered because it looked strong, while the same size sat unsold in another store two hundred kilometres away. Discounting started late, when the season was already gone.

What we built

One place every channel reports into, in the brand’s own account. Each channel keeps selling the way it sells; what changed is that every sale, return and cancellation lands in the same shape, with a product being one product whether it left a shop, a marketplace or the website. The rule for each number is written down once, so sales means the same thing to finance and to buying.

Every store manager has a dashboard for their own store: what sold, what is running low, what has not moved. The founder has the same picture across all eleven stores and all three channels, ready each morning before the shops open.

On top of that sits a reorder view that does the reading nobody had time for. It flags what to reorder, what to move to a store where the same size is selling, and what to discount before the season takes the decision instead. The system suggests and the buying team decides, and every decision they take is recorded, so the suggestions are judged against what the buyers actually did rather than against a claim.

What the owner was left with

One set of numbers for every store and every channel, ready each morning. Month-end runs from one screen, and the numbers finance signs off are the numbers the buying team saw. Every report has a written definition, so a new analyst can be told what a figure means instead of learning it from whoever left.

The parallel run is the part the founder valued most: for each report, the old one and the new one ran side by side until they agreed or the difference was explained and signed off. Nothing anybody trusted was switched off before the replacement had earned it.

The handover review was honest about the limits. The reorder suggestions are only as good as the stock picture under them, which is why the numbers came first and the suggestions second, and why the running cost of the whole thing was written down before the build.