The Inventory Gap: Why Your Books Don't Match Your Warehouse | Pierre Goldie | Fiskal Finance | Profits on Purpose

Episode Description

If your inventory lives in one place and your financials live somewhere else, you already know the gap in between is where bad decisions get made. In this episode, Nate sits down with Pierre Goldie, Co-Founder and CGO of Fiskal, to talk about what it actually looks like to close that gap.

Pierre breaks down when founders outgrow spreadsheets, how to evaluate and choose an inventory management system, and why the implementation partner you choose often matters more than the software itself. They also get into the real cost of getting it wrong — messy books, corrupted data, and the painful reality of not being able to close your books because your IMS and your accounting software are both broken. If you've been running your product business on gut feel and a spreadsheet, this one's for you.

Key Takeaways

• The real value of inventory management systems lies in transforming business operations, not just in the technology itself.

• Clarity around financial and inventory data is the key to confident decision-making.

• Choosing the right IMS partner is often more critical than selecting the software itself.

• Proper implementation is a business transformation, not just a technological upgrade.

• Higher complexity and larger scale demand more robust, phased implementation approaches.

• Business analytics and ongoing system audits are vital for ensuring long-term success.

• The biggest risk to founders is doing it alone and rushing to implementation.

See More from Pierre and Fiskal Finance

• Fiskal Finance's Official Website 
• LinkedIn
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Listen to the full episode to discover how Pierre's experiences can inspire and guide you on your entrepreneurial journey. Don't forget to subscribe for more insightful conversations!

I hope you enjoy this episode!

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– Nate and the Profits on Purpose podcast team

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Transcript

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00:00 Introduction to Clarity in Business Operations
02:04 The Evolution of Fiskal Finance
04:18 Transitioning from Spreadsheets to Advanced Systems
07:50 Choosing the Right Inventory Management Solution
12:41 Why Cin7? The Rationale Behind the Choice
15:15 People-Related Challenges in Implementation
18:02 Understanding IMS vs ERP Systems
21:17 Measuring Success Through Accounting Software
24:14 Case Studies: Transformations Through IMS
26:25 Business System Analysis and Recommendations
29:30 Cost Considerations for Implementation
31:35 The Risks of DIY Implementations
35:50 Conclusion and Resources

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Nate Littlewood (00:06)
Have you ever thought what it would feel like to place a purchase order and actually know, not guess, not hope, but know that the timing is right, the margin works, and that the cash is actually gonna be there to pay for it? For most founders and a lot of the folks that I talk to, that kind of clarity often feels out of reach.

Their inventory lives in one place, their finances live somewhere else, and the gap between the two is where bad decisions very commonly get made. The good news is today's guest is an expert in closing that gap.

Welcome to Profits on Purpose, the podcast for e-commerce and consumer products founders who are looking to scale their businesses both profitably and purposefully. I'm your host, Nate Littlewood from Future Ready CFO, where I help seven figure e-com and CPG founders build the financial and operational foundations that they need to scale their businesses to eight figures and beyond.

Today's guest is Pierre Goldie, who's the co-founder of Fiskal Finance. Pierre's entire business exists to solve one very, very specific problem, which is addressing the gap between what's happening in your operations and what's showing up in your books and your accounting system. These guys are the number one Cin7 implementation experts in the US.

And Pierre has seen firsthand what it costs founders to run a product business without clarity. And he's built a practice all about solving that problem. Pierre, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.

Pierre Goldie (01:59)
Nice, thank you Nate, that was a cool intro. Liked it.

Nate Littlewood (02:04)
Sure. Well, listen, I'd love to get started just talking about the backstory here a little bit. You guys have been working on this business since around 2017, from what I understand. And you've been focused in the US marketplace for five or six years now. Take me back to the beginning. You know, how did you guys start out at this space and what are some of the big steps or, you know, evolutionary changes in the company? Over that timeframe.

Pierre Goldie (02:35)
For sure. So we started out like a good old conventional cloud-based accounting firm out of South Africa. In 2018, we did it all, bookkeeping, compliance, taxes, controlling. And we were pretty fortunate to be introduced to good cloud-based technology pretty early on, right around that time. To be honest, I think it spilled over a lot in the...

from the Commonwealth, so specifically New Zealand and Australia, so those specific tools that we'll touch on. But B.O. does it make, that's how we got introduced to this industry. So it started off in South Africa, like you mentioned, cloud-based accounting, and then it started to spill over to the U.S.

Nate Littlewood (03:20)
Gotcha. Okay. So you guys have obviously focused in on not just inventory management and inventory management systems, but also, you know, a fairly specific piece of software within that industry, which I understand to be, since seven, we're going to come back and, talk more about that in a little bit. But for the founders that are listening, I wanted to understand what the evolution into a system or a setup like the one that you guys provide, what that evolution kind of looks like. know, a lot of people when they're starting an e-commerce business, they'll be doing things with Google Sheets or Excel to keep tabs of their inventory. Talk me through...

you know, the major evolutionary steps that you see. Like how do we know when we've outgrown a spreadsheet and we should be upgrading to something more sophisticated than that?

Pierre Goldie (04:18)
Yeah, sure. So I think before one can answer that question, you need to just understand the market a little bit. And what I mean of that is if we start around the smaller where everyone starts, it's Google Sheets, right? Excel, everyone's favorite accounting software. And then we get into the SMB space. Let's call it one million to 30 million, 50 million, whatever. And there's a big market for inventory management.

Right, so inventory management solutions. It doesn't typically get classified as ERP solutions. So we can go through it, but just to name a few, Cin7Core, Omni, Katana, Fishbowl, Unleashed, Odoozoro, Skew Vault, Skew.io, right, I can go on. So there's a whole gamut of these tools available. So the question is how do you decide which one to use?

Like I said, I'm not even going to go into the net suites and the larger players because stay away, stay clear. So anyway, you first need to understand that and then you can ask yourself, where are you? So I think your question was, being a company that started off on spreadsheets, how do they then distinguish that they're ready to move to the next tier? that the question? Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, for me, it's about return on investment.

Complexity, those are the two things that comes to mind. So what I mean with return on investment is if you as a founder are spending more time on the sheets than you are doing other items that's important for the business, you know you've got issues, right? I mean, if your software's gonna cost you $350 per month, but you're spending eight, nine, 10 hours a month just doing what the software can do, you don't have a good return on investment, right? And the same with complexities, like how...

what data do you want from your system to make informed business decisions? So if you're not getting that data and you can't make informed business decisions from that spreadsheet, you probably have an issue. That being said, I mean, I know of a lot of companies that grew pretty far into eight figures with spreadsheets, right? So for some operators it works. I'm not saying there's a one size fits all.

But yeah, there is some rule of thumb.

Nate Littlewood (06:41)
Okay, just out of curiosity, what is the largest brand that you think you've ever seen running off spreadsheets?

Pierre Goldie (06:50)
I've heard about 50 bills.

Nate Littlewood (06:53)
50 million or billion? Million, million. Okay. Okay. 50 million. Okay. Wow. Okay. That's, that's significant. That must be a pretty complicated, uh, located spreadsheet. Okay. So

Pierre Goldie (06:56)
Million. You're right, exactly.

Nate Littlewood (07:10)
I understand what you're saying. We're getting to the point where, you know, these softwares are hundreds, maybe low thousands of dollars per month to get up and running. And you're saying, hey, if you're spending more than, I don't know, half a day or a day per week managing this stuff, then the value of your time is more than what you would be spending to manage the software.

So if someone's gotten to the point where they're thinking, okay, I need to do this. I need better solution than what I have now, how should they go about surveying the options and figuring out which one is right for them?

Pierre Goldie (07:50)
That's a great question. mean, go to your favorite AI tool to start off with. No, I'm only kidding. I would say the thing that I see business owners not do well, so we can start with the process of elimination, is understanding what you're trying to solve.

So whether that's just writing out on a piece of paper, you can go obviously more complex from there having an interaction with whatever, finding a template online, but finding some requirements, problems that I'm solving, what do I have, what features do I want out of IMS or whatever you're actually looking for. I would start with that and then I would start obviously speaking to industry experts, asking around, asking your other brands that has implemented it. So would go that approach if I had to start from scratch.

Nate Littlewood (08:48)
Okay, okay. So I went through this process a couple of times with my own e-commerce business, you know, a few years back. And one of the things that I came to appreciate about looking for inventory management solutions is that there's no, you know, right solution

and what might be best for you or your brand is not necessarily going to be the right fit for my brand. Like they've all got their different quirks and features and integrations and know capabilities and so forth. Is there there such things as any standardized checklists that you would recommend people go through or specific questions that you think they need to be asking either of themselves or of the software providers to figure out you know which one is the the best fit?

Pierre Goldie (09:37)
That's a tough question. mean, and that's a great observation. I think it isn't the one size fits all. At the end of the day, it's about what your team is comfortable with and probably finding someone that can help you with it as well, initially. In my opinion, there's horror stories when you try and do something that you're probably going to do three to five times in your career, right? And then you try to act like an expert. It's a difficult one. It is just a difficult solve from the get go.

So I think, yeah, choosing the right one's difficult, but then choosing the right partner with that is also pretty important. What checklist to ask the software providers? That's a tough question. mean, I would wanna understand how my business is gonna run on it, right? I want as much as possible. So if I, when I go live, how is it gonna look? How is it gonna act? So obviously doing demos, playing around with yourself.

Yeah, I want to go as live as possible before I pay that amount of money and make that big of a disruption in my operations and for my people and change all my processes. So it's obviously not possible to go full on, but I would want that.

And then pricing is obviously important one, understanding exactly what's included, excluded how these software increase their prices. We all understand the captured crowd and you want that side of the equation also sorted. What do you think?

Nate Littlewood (11:17)
So the way that I tackled it is I thought a lot about how my business actually operates and where the pain points are for me. And I, know, some of these tools are, you know, good at manufacturing, for example, and they make it easy to have bombs and assemblage and add in labored in different ways and, you know, 3PL or kidding fees in different ways.

And I actually had to put together a list of about 70 different questions, which is like, you know, how do you integrate with Amazon? How do you integrate with Shopify? Like what does customer service look like? How do you do this? How do do that? And, you know, we went through this list of questions and, you know, through a process of elimination basically settled on the tool that we ended up using. But yeah, it's certainly a complicated topic for sure.

You've obviously settled on one specific solution here though, which is obviously Cin7. I'd love to understand the rationale behind that. Like what was it about that product or that software that made you say, hey, I wanna hitch myself to this one and we're gonna go all in on Cin7.

Pierre Goldie (12:41)
Yeah, good question. I feel the fact that it's a good product to start off with, right? So if I, like I said, we were dabbling with a lot of software at the start and we all just made the call that we like this product the best straight up, right? Okay. And the fact that we all knew the product and we worked with it before and we've worked with it for quite a while now and we knew it inside out.

We saw the results that clients get on it. That was also a big one. And this pulls back to the first, the question before this, which is we, in our opinion, we're confident enough that we can make it work for most clients. I'm speaking about, there's outliers, right? Again, like if you're super complex, super big, we can dive into that of why it wouldn't work for you. But the fact is we know it inside out.

So we can make it work for someone if they trust the process. I even wanna go as far as saying that I honestly believe the partner you select with any IMS is almost more important than the software itself.

Nate Littlewood (13:53)
Mm hmm. Yeah. me. Tell me more about that.

Pierre Goldie (13:56)
I will, I will say, and then I want to add the reason why we went all in Cin7 as well is we believed if we want to be the best, we need to commit to one and invest all of our resources into the software. Right. So if all of us, all 21 of our team members focuses on one solution, puts in all the focus, then we're to innovate, right. And especially in today's environment, it's got an open API. So there's a lot that you can do to make this world.

easier for your client to adopt the system. And that's at the end of the day to your question that you just asked me about why, because I don't think it's that much about the solution, it's more about the people and the process they're with the solution. So people process technology, people process is much more important than the technology in my opinion. Getting people to change, that's the difficult thing, right? And changing your processes.

Nate Littlewood (14:57)
Okay, okay. It sounds like you've got some interesting stories there. I want to hear more about that. Tell me about some of the people-related challenges that you typically encounter when you're trying to implement solutions like this.

Pierre Goldie (15:15)
Right. So think about it. If a typical client is probably coming or prospect is coming from either nothing or from a legacy tool, right? Something old school that's clunky, you know, but if they come from nothing, they've never used an IMS and never followed processes and never had that specific discipline to get the results. So having them change, just a quick.

example, you've got Shopify and QBO, right? The way you recognize cost of sales, if you recognize cost of sales, which a lot of people don't do, but if you recognize cost of sales in that equation or do standard costing or whatever you get to get your inventory, that's a specific process that your accountant's following. But when you plug in one of these IMSs in the middle of that, everything changes. So when I say everything changes, all the processes and all the

the way people reacted to it now changes. So we have to retrain them to follow different processes. Does that make sense?

Nate Littlewood (16:21)
It does, it does. So is part of what you do the training for the users and operators of the software? And you kind of give people, I guess an instruction manual or like an SOP library or something, is that right?

Pierre Goldie (16:35)
That's about 80 % of it, right? Training people, writing out standard operating procedures, doing a current analysis to a future state and having essentially a gap analysis, giving them access to our LMS. So we've created an LMS, which is essentially a, we duplicated across clients, we feed it the transcripts of our calls with these clients, we feed it the standing operating procedures of that specific client and that becomes their hub.

where they can train themselves up on some seven navs, something where they can fall back on for modules as they develop. Yeah, standard operating procedures, LMS, online calls. There's a lot of embedded support in that before you want to go live. And then when you go live, the fun actually starts.

Nate Littlewood (17:27)
Right, right. Pierre, I'm just going to pause for a minute. We're using a lot of TLAs here, so I just want to clarify a couple of things. IMS is Inventory Management System. You mentioned LMS, which I assume is a Learning Management System. I think we might have thrown around the term ERP or Enterprise Resource Planning Tool earlier. Can we just circle back for a minute and can you talk about the difference between an IMS or inventory management system and an ERP.

Pierre Goldie (18:02)
Yes.

So ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planner. I always like to use the example like Coca-Cola is on an ERP, right? It's a customized tool that's built out for your business. It's typically large enterprise. So think SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, whatever. And then IMS is an inventory management solution. And it typically is a module within an ERP, but in our case,

it serves a specific purpose. it's its own tool like OpsPot is a CRM and it serves its own tool and QuickBooks is it's, serves its own for accounting. So in 7 and unleashed add all of these server specific purpose for inventory management. Yeah. Makes sense.

Nate Littlewood (18:50)
Yeah. It does. Forgive me if I've asked you about this previously. I think it may have came up a few weeks ago when we had lunch, but I wanted to re-ask it here because I think it's an interesting thing for folks to think about.

When you look at the technology and tools in this space that eCom sellers are using, there's really two, maybe three accounting platforms that most folks are using. You've got QBO, you've got Xero and, you know, Final Loop as the newer entrant. When we get into the inventory management side, I mean, you rattled off, I think maybe nine or 10 different names earlier, of which in seven is one, but I suspect that the list is a lot longer than that. I'm guessing there's some reason.

we could probably easily dig up 20 or 30. Why is it that there's so many more inventory management systems compared to accounting systems?

Pierre Goldie (19:48)
That's a great question. I think.

I think there are probably firstly more accounting systems out there, but they're definitely not as many as I'm ASUS. What I can tell you is it's like the gold standard in accounting that Xero and QBO is just, mean, own, I'm not sure what portion of the market, especially in the US, but that is a great question. I'm not sure what the answer is.

Nate Littlewood (20:18)
Want to ponder if anyone's got any thoughts, maybe they can leave a comment and educate me on that one. We'll check out the comments later if anyone has anything to share.

Pierre Goldie (20:24)
Yeah, me too. That's a great question.

Nate Littlewood (20:30)
Okay. So I wanted to circle back on something you mentioned two or three minutes ago, which is you said that one of the reasons that you, you picked Cin7 is because of the client results that you'd seen from it. And in our, chemistry call the other day when we were, you know, chatting, you mentioned that one of the ways that you kind of measure the success of one of these implementations is not through the inventory management system itself, but it's by what you see happening in the accounting software. Could you elaborate on that a little bit? How do we know from looking at the accounting system that we have a good inventory management solution in place?

Pierre Goldie (21:17)
So when I spoke about this hypothetical ecosystem with your sales channels on top, right? Amazon, Shopify, and then IMS in the middle, and then your accounting software at the end. Everything is essentially flowing from your sales channels through your IMS as a conduit and then hitting your reporting, your accounting software. Okay. So we call that almost like the catching net.

Nate Littlewood (21:32)
Mm-hmm.

Pierre Goldie (21:46)
for everything that's happening. Everything above the line, gross profit gets dictated by the IMS and then on your balance sheet inventory and your clearing accounts. But the rest is driven out of your accounting software. So OPEX and fix assets and whatever. And why I say the results of within your accounting software is a reflection of your IMS is because your sales needs to tie up with your sales channels.

right, it needs to come through your, your IMS as the conduit. So if anything goes wrong in there, or you're doing something wrong, it's not going to tie up except if you're using Atex. Okay. But let's assume you don't. Then from a cost of sales perspective, same story. And then from an inventory perspective and from a clearing accounts perspective. So, so if everything's going as it should, and you're, you're following the processes, you've got a

clean IMS, your data will be accurate in your accounting software. So that's how I measure it because if your GP margins consistent month over month, there's a good chance that you are doing things as you should within your IMS.

Nate Littlewood (23:02)
Okay, okay, got it.

Pierre Goldie (23:04)
That and if you count your inventory in your physical warehouse, whether you're using a 3PL, you just have your own warehouse and you're counting it and that ties up with your balance sheet. Anderson 7, mean those students know you good.

Nate Littlewood (23:20)
Got it, got it. So I understand what you're saying from a, I guess, consistency and cleanliness of the data and numbers. I'm wondering if we can think about this a little bit more from the perspective of the founder, right? We're equipping or talking about equipping founders with, you know, more sophisticated tools than what they might currently be using, especially if they're graduating from a spreadsheet.

Tell me a little bit about some of the case studies or success stories that you might've seen in terms of, I guess, founder enablement, like some of the financial, you know, turnarounds or improvements that you have, you know, been a part of as a result of upgrading these businesses with better infantry management systems.

Pierre Goldie (24:14)
Sure. So I think the key theme that we need to understand here is that we're not necessarily only implementing an IMS, we're actually doing business transformation, right? So in a lot of cases, they just call it client A, is stuck in the past, right? They're either on a legacy IMS or they're on something like SAP, or they, like I said earlier, they are nothing, right? So they're trading like it's 2006 and not 2026.

So what we wanna do is we wanna modernize them and take them from where they are and bring them up to speed. And that, in my opinion, is a little bit more than just implementing a specific Cin7 in the mix, right? That's one cog in this large scheme of things that we wanna get right. So getting your accounting software clean, potentially plugging something else in there like a RAM, Augusta, we wanna bring them with these not.

these nice intuitive tools, we wanna bring them forward and have that all playing out nicely. Then we wanna potentially think about a database for reporting. So there's a lot that we can do. So for me, it's more about working through milestones. And since 7, implementing that is the first cog in that wheel to get right. And when that is stabilized, we wanna go through the journey of having that all play nicely and getting accurate data. So financial operating system that...

that's succeeding. Did I answer your question there? think you're happy with that.

Nate Littlewood (25:43)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's helpful. That's helpful. Okay. I understand that before you actually get into working on one of these projects with a client, you guys do some type of like business and system analytics, like an audit or review. Tell me about some of the common things that you, you you learn through that process. And when you do that audit,

Are there ever cases or situations when you would say, you know what, Cin7 is actually not the right tool for you and I think you should go in this different direction instead.

Pierre Goldie (26:25)
Sure. So, regarding the business and system analysis, you are 100 % correct. We do it for clients that are already on since seven. In a lot of cases, probably most cases, clients are coming to us, they've already implemented since seven, it's not working out. But from our perspective, we wanna understand why it's not working out. So how do we do that? We need to look under the hood, right? We need to understand what's going on with the news at seven. So that's a key...

analysis for us to understand three things that we measure. It's just people, process and technology within that. Okay. Right. And then if they're not on Cin7, like you mentioned, then they're trying to implement Cin7. We want to understand their business to understand whether Cin7 is the right tool for them. And we want to understand their business, understand how we will implement Cin7 to make it work. Because like I said earlier, IMS, like Cin7 is not designed

for your business, it's designed for the masses, but we want to get, we want to unlock the most value out of it. And the way we do that is to understand your business the best and then implement it accordingly. Because the way you architect and configure it is critical for the success of that. You asked three questions in there. What was the third? I'm struggling to keep up.

Nate Littlewood (27:44)
Yeah, it was a long one. I'm sorry. I should probably break them down. The final piece of it was, you know, are there ever cases where you say to people, listen, Cin7's not actually the right fit for you. And if so, is there any theme to that? Like, is there common reasons that you would say to people, no, you should look elsewhere?

Pierre Goldie (28:04)
What I do in that case is I actually work with a consultant that does a really good job in unpacking IMSs. So if clients are unsure, I try to stay clear of that and say, well, let's make sure that you are comfortable with Cin7. And then I send them that way to get that answer because when they come to us, we want to confirm that Cin7 is the right tool for them. And if they're not, we want to find the right tool.

That's what we do at this stage.

Nate Littlewood (28:35)
Okay, so I guess what I had wrong is that you really only engaging with them and working with them if they've kind of already settled on this as being a solution. So they've already done, you know, the homework step before that to determine that this is where they want to be. Is that right?

Pierre Goldie (28:52)
That's right, but we will also give them thumbs up that we agree that it is right. And that's what we do in our business system analysis if someone's not on Cin7. Then we are trying to assess, firstly, is it right? But also then if it's right, how do we approach the implementation?

Nate Littlewood (29:08)
Okay, that makes sense. And I assume that there's probably a pretty big range here in terms of what this costs, but is there any kind of reference points or guides that you could give us for people to think about, you know, what it would actually cost to get some help from someone like you?

Pierre Goldie (29:30)
It's a, long is a piece of string answer to be honest, because there's different ways we can approach it. Right, we have a fiscal light, which is essentially something between what the market offers, and we'll speak about what the market offers, because we also offer that, and then what Cin7 offers. So it's a light touch point where we guide clients and they do a lot of the heavy lifting, but they follow our project plan, we give them access to our tools, we advise and we guide, right?

That's 2,500 per month. And again, it's self guided. So the quicker they can get through the tasks, the quicker they can go live. And we obviously gonna let them know whether they are ready, whether they are trained. They're gonna go through our LMS, learning management software. And if they succeed, well, they can go live. So that's the light implementation. And then the standard goes for anything between 10 to 20 to 30.

I've heard of more. So again, depending on complexity, depending on how many modules you want to implement, right? So there's CIN7-4, which is purchase orders, sale orders, inventory management. But you're going to listen now, you asked me this question, now there's WMS, material requirements planning, point of sale, how many sales channels do they have, advanced manufacturing. So again, it's like how many of these components are part of it over what period of time do you want to roll it out? What team do you have?

Nate Littlewood (31:02)
Yeah.

Pierre Goldie (31:07)
Right. yeah. Are we filling a void in that team potentially? Right. Do you have the team to actually implement it? So there's there's a there's a ton of questions that you need to run through, my opinion, before you can answer how much is this going to cost. But the yeah, the the market price is probably between 15 and 20 for the core side of it, not the additional modules. So connecting to sales channels and your accounting software.

Nate Littlewood (31:29)
Got it, got it.

Yep. Okay. Makes sense. So if, which is not a lot to pay for getting expert help and you know, someone who really knows what they're doing. What are some of the horror stories that you've encountered from people who have attempted to DIY this? Like how much of a mess can someone conceivably actually get themselves into if they try to do it themselves and muck it up?

Pierre Goldie (31:35)
Not more, yeah.

Correct, I just wanted to comment on your, or what you just said. I don't think it's necessarily thinking about it as what you're paying a consultant for, but more thinking about like, why do I need to pay to transform my business? Right, that for me is, if I'm a business owner today and I'm thinking about I'm stuck in the past, what will I pay to get me up to speed and find someone to help me with that? And again, agnostic option seven,

That's the value for money question that I would want to ask myself. Mesh, well, a lot of mess. I mean, I think we all have heard of horror ERP implementations, right? So again, if you speak about ERP implementations, which is typically for higher revenue clients and more complexity, it's a well-known fact that I think, I'm not sure about the percentage, but I've heard 70 % of ER implementations fail.

The risk is so much bigger. Again, I'm speaking about ERP implementations like full blown. It's the big in right next week or whatever. So, but in the IMS space exactly the same. The thing that I find the most is the underappreciated manner in which business owners approach it.

Meaning it's very underestimated and it's difficult. The IMS is actually the same as implementing an ERP because it's complex. Getting this entire ecosystem to work together, getting your team to follow all of these processes, that's super complex. So being, not spending enough on that is, in my opinion, not a good decision. So to answer your question, I see a lot of horror stories where I hear about two weeks, four weeks implementations and I'm like,

“How does that even work?: Sure, if you are super simple and you are super switched on, and you have a natural knack for software, I don't know, simplistic. Yeah, there will be outliers, but the majority of clients implementing this, in my opinion, cannot do it in that short turnaround and in that manner.

Yes, then you're implementing it, you're changing everything, you're six months in and now your accounting is a mess because you connected your IMS to your accounting software. Prior to that your accounting was fine because you just manually journaled everything. Now this IMS is corrupting all your data within your IMS and now you're sitting with a lot of mess. Yeah. Right now you to your... Now you need to fix...

Nate Littlewood (34:49)
IMS I guess. Yeah. Okay.

Pierre Goldie (34:51)
Exactly, you want to close your books, but you can't because your eye is not... and that's just terrible because now you've three... yeah, it's not going to that. That's not a... you don't want to get this.

Nate Littlewood (35:05)
Yeah, no, it's incredibly scary to be running a business in that sort of situation where you don't know what the inventory is worth. You don't have clarity on the cash. You don't understand any of the numbers. You know, are these counts correct? Are these quantities correct? Are these numbers correct? And you really just have to guess when you're in that sort of situation. And when you're guessing and going off intuition, it's, the risk of making mistakes and getting something wrong is tremendous.

I mean, probably a 99 % chance that you will make a mistake. And so I this is a pretty small price to pay for peace of mind and the ability to make decisions confidently and clearly.

Pierre Goldie (35:50)
Correct, yeah, that's a good word. Peace of mind. That's actually what you're buying. And if you think about, again, the business owner is you, in my opinion, does not want to be distracted of having to focus on something like this. They should focus on marketing and sales and growing the business. So this is really something that you just want to get right from the start. And I'll just throw one more in there. You just touched on it. Imagine implementing this IMS.

But you had accurate data within your accounting software. And now you went forward with this and now you don't have anymore. How annoying that is. And yeah, so I can imagine how frustrated that must be to go down that route.

Nate Littlewood (36:33)
Absolutely, Well, Pierre, it's been lovely having you on the show. I appreciate you opening up and sharing your wisdom on all things IMS in 7 and, you know, accounting related. For anyone who's interested in maybe reaching out for a chat or just learning a little bit more about what you guys do, where is the best place for them to find you?

Pierre Goldie (36:58)
Online, that's probably a no-brainer, but yes, online, fiskalfinance.com. mean, Peter Goldie is also not a too well-known name around here, so I'm sure you can find me on LinkedIn and you can then connect the dots to our website and go check us out.

Nate Littlewood (37:18)
Okay, perfect. Well, thank you again for coming on. Lovely to chat and I guess we'll chat again soon. Take care.

Pierre Goldie (37:26)
Yes, thanks for having me, Bye.