All about
Bean Ninjas are an international team of Ecommerce growth accountants structured to optimize your accounting strategy as you grow and add more tools and channels to your stack.
They take care of all of your accounting needs:
- Bookkeeping
- Financial reporting
- Advanced accounting
- Virtual CFO
- Advisory services, etc.
They are a global firm with a strong tech strategy for making it easy to integrate your business into streamlined accounting.
Their services can start as small as basic bookkeeping and accounting and move into more advanced accounting, say for preparing a brand for exit/sell, itemizing add-backs, or keeping track of your seller discretionary earnings, custom journal entries for depreciation, pre-payments, payroll, etc.
They take you from that top-line revenue number you might be staring at in your Shopify account, and start to properly track all costs, impact of shipping, returns, operating costs, to get you to your true revenue and profit numbers.
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One of the core pieces of advice I give merchants is: Make sure you’re using a tool designed for Ecommerce.
There are hundreds of accounting firms that could do your books, but there aren’t that many dedicated specifically to Ecommerce. Bean Ninjas is completely dedicated to the unique needs of Ecommerce merchants and their real secret sauce is in helping you align your tech stack for optimal financial performance, and then applying their solid accounting practices/functionalities on top of that.
When starting with Bean Ninjas, they’re going to have a starting focus on accounting over finance: focused on historical decisions impacting future decisions, whereas finance is focused on creating the story you want to tell based on your numbers. As the accounting gets squared away, your brand may need to understand the accounting better and begin to change focus into telling that financial story.
There are three main components to financial reporting:
- Every year you need to have your accounting and bookkeeping in order to present your bottom line profit to the tax man.
- Then you need to understand the operational finances in order to figure out which levers you can pull within the business to impact business through improving margin, revenue, or sales. Bean Ninjas is providing you with the reports in order to figure out which levers you need to pull.
- Then comes anyone looking to sell. If you ever want to sell your company, Bean Ninja helps you keep track of your seller discretionary earnings and make it easier to present your company to potential buyers and brokers to sell at a higher multiple.
Bean Ninjas is going to be set up and managed directly by the founding team and/or CEO and they will sit with your team as a part of your executive team to give advice based on what they are seeing from your business finances.
Bean Ninjas is best for merchants doing more than $2mm/year, and less than $50mm/year, across multiple channels who are growing quickly. You must be willing to use or align with their preferred tech stack, which includes Xero, A2X, and Hubdoc (which is owned by Xero).
You’re going to want to use them more as you need additional dashboards, reports, or financial modeling to best predict cash flow and future inventory.
They are especially great for brands who know they want to sell their brand in the next couple of years. They are more than happy to help their merchants sell their stores and be successful, even if it means the end of their relationship.
They work well with high-growth Amazon-focused brands, and can start with basic bookkeeping services.
They can work with internal accounting teams and scale out bookkeeping, finance, reporting on top of that internal team. They honestly can be a lot cheaper than bringing your finances in-house simply because they have a scalable team that you don’t have to pay benefits for that works 24/7 for you.
You will naturally need better accounting when you have longer lead times on inventory, have to float a lot of cash, or need to be very accurate with your predictive financials (such as having very slim margins or always needing to sell out on product exactly every month or risk losing massive profits).
Starting stores and slow growth smaller merchants are not great fits for Bean Ninjas. However, brands that have raised a bunch of capital and are really expecting to hit millions in a few months or years can reach out to them to get set up properly and have a partner keeping things organized from the get-go.
Brands growing over $50mm/year may be outgrowing Bean Ninjas and look to bring their accounting in-house, at which point Bean Ninjas can do a thorough handoff.
Brands that are a part of a rollup or aggregator probably don’t need Bean Ninjas as you likely have your own in-company accounting teams.