An AI-driven approach to drive business outcomes
There’s been plenty of fintech “disruption” over the last dozen or so years. Despite that, 6-in-10 organizations’ accounting teams remain trapped in the daily grind of transaction processing and manual reconciliation.
Fortunately, there’s a far, far better way for teams to operate than reactive reporting and month-end firefighting (but we’ll get to that in a minute).
Even if your team could promise 100% accuracy at month’s end — and few can claim that — operating a business today necessitates real-time insights, strategic guidance, and proactive problem-solving from their accounting teams.
And still, most accountants barely have time to look up from their reconciliation worksheets.
So how, then, does a team maintain pristine financial records and drive strategic value?
Shifting from defense to offense.
As for how, the answer lies in automation, data-driven insights, and a fundamental shift in how accounting teams approach their role. This guide outlines a 7 step framework for transforming your accounting team from reactive record-keepers to proactive business partners. You'll learn specific strategies for automating low-value tasks, leveraging financial data for decision-making, and positioning your team as a strategic asset to the business.
Finally, you’ll see how to make the most out of using AI and partnering with it to make your team even stronger.
Get practical insights and proven frameworks from the perspective of someone who's been there. Each week, the CEO and Co-Founder of Blue Onion, Lyndsey Bunting (Ex-VP of Finance @ Birchbox, CFO @Resonance) shares real solutions for scaling finance operations, automating reconciliation, and taking your team from defense to offense.
Without context, leadership within a business is always going to ask why the numbers don't match.
This points to an important issue: reactivity is not going to drive strategy. Instead, accounting teams must transform from reporters on past history to proactive financial advisors.
With billions in transactions flowing through commerce systems, every business’s financial data holds strategic insights waiting to be unlocked.
.svg)
Thanks to you and the Blue Onion team, the most recent automation has enabled me to significantly reduce the review time. The visibility of the transactions by order ID is very helpful to understand what was posted to this account and I can use the info to track back to the original orders in Shopify.”
The traditional approach of monthly variance reporting and post-mortem analysis is indeed outdated. More importantly, it's holding your business back.
Leading accounting teams are leveraging automated reconciliation to:
Spot concerning trends before they impact the bottom line
Identify cost savings opportunities in real-time
Flag revenue leakage within 24 hours, not 30 days
Present solutions, not just explanations
Accounting teams' role isn’t to simply record what happened but should be helping use that information to shape what happens next. When reconciliation is automated with 99% accuracy, you can focus on driving business value as opposed to just tracking it.
Instead of waiting for finance or leadership to request analysis, present insights on cost savings, revenue opportunities, and financial risks before they become issues.
Each and every transaction, fee, and payment flow tells a story about your business’s performance. Yet most organizations use their accounting team solely to record this data and make sure 1 and 1 makes two.
The traditional approach of monthly variance reporting and post-mortem analysis is indeed outdated. More importantly, it's holding your business back.
This disconnect stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of modern accounting's potential.
Yes, your team tracks and reconciles transactions. At the same time, accounting teams have the single best visibility into every dollar flowing through the business.
Instead of just booking fees from Amazon or Klarna, take time to assess whether these fees justify the revenue gained. If fees are eroding margins, propose alternative sales strategies.
This unique vantage point could give you the ability to:
Analyze profitability patterns across sales channels
Identify which customer segments drive the highest lifetime value
Evaluate the true cost of different payment methods
Measure the ROI of promotional campaigns
When accounting teams shift from data entry and validation to data analysis, they become the strategic partners they’re meant to be. Automated reconciliation can handle the basics. Then, your team can focus on answering critical business questions before they're asked.
Following our own advice around data, let’s go back to the numbers.
When it comes to manual reconciliation for transactions, reports estimate that it takes about 3–5 minutes per transaction for less experienced users, which can drop to about 1 minute for seasoned bookkeepers.
But this reveals the double-edged sword of success for the business.
Amazon for instance processes 11.95 million orders daily. Even at the most efficient rate of 1 minute per transaction for experienced bookkeepers, that would add up to 22.7 YEARS of work every single day. Obviously they are an outlier but still, there’s an important lesson here.
Prior to using Blue Onion, our team manually created invoices for our direct-to-consumer orders. With a high volume of orders ranging from 40,000 to 200,000 per month, importing each order into our general ledger system was impractical."
Processing even hundreds of thousands of transactions monthly means manual reconciliation is simply not sustainable.
More importantly, it prevents your team from delivering the strategic insights your business needs to grow.
What your accounting team must do to break this cycle is:
Automate daily transaction matching
Eliminate manual data downloads from multiple systems
Create real-time visibility into financial patterns
Shift from data entry to data analysis
We know. Everybody knows your operations need to improve. There’s no discipline in the world that doesn’t need improvement in some capacity.
But accounting teams feel it every time you:
Download another CSV file
Manually match transactions
Hunt for missing deposits
Explain reconciliation discrepancies
Rush to meet month-end deadlines
Missing transactions are a problem. Discrepancies are a problem.
Both of these take valuable time from your team trying to identify and triage the situation. The deeper problem is investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in hiring accounting team members who could be driving business value that are instead matching cells within spreadsheets.
But building a business case for change requires more than just identifying inefficiencies. Addressing this issue requires concrete data and measurable impact.
Automating the reconciliation process eliminates manual data entry errors, reducing our reconciliation time from approximately 5 hours per week to just 20 minutes."
Here's what successful accounting teams demonstrate when advocating for automation:
5-hour weekly processes become 20-minute tasks
Month-end close drops from 10 days to 72 hours
Transaction matching accuracy reaches 99%
Real-time visibility replaces monthly surprises
Strategic analysis replaces data entry
Perhaps you're processing payments through Stripe, PayPal, Klarna, and Afterpay, managing orders in Shopify and Amazon, or reconciling marketplace fees from Walmart and Target.
Each platform comes with its own reporting system, fee structure, and settlement timeline.
Without automated reconciliation, tracking revenue across these channels means:
Downloading separate reports from each platform
Manually matching transactions across systems
Reconciling different fee structures
Tracking varying settlement timelines
Investigating discrepancies between systems
Instead of managing revenue sources in silos, create a unified dashboard that shows revenue, fees, and settlements across all channels in real-time.
Thus, financial insights get buried in spreadsheets, and revenue leakage goes undetected.
As Supergoop's Controller discovered, trying to manually manage high-volume transactions across multiple platforms is literally impossible.
Automation isn’t a time saver. That’s underplaying the power it has with connecting data sources.
Instead, you’re creating a single source of truth for your revenue data and having a far more accurate picture of your business’s financial health in real-time.
From there, accounting teams can:
Ensure financial decisions align with business goals.
Help teams evaluate the profitability of new sales channels, promotions, or partnerships.
Take a larger role in budgeting, forecasting, and performance tracking.
Reporting numbers is defensive. Shaping strategy, on the other hand, takes things to another level.
Moving from reactive to proactive includes:
Not waiting for month-end to spot issues
Identifying trends before they become problems
Flagging risk areas early
Challenging assumptions with data
Tracking cash flow patterns
Monitoring profit margins
Automate the routine so you can focus on strategy. Use real-time data to spot trends and guide decisions before problems emerge.
To do this, your team must be the first to know and the most prepared to advise when:
Addressing issues with weekly or daily alerts
Noting when data contradicts assumptions
Recognizing cash flow shifts
Highlighting when margins begin to compress
Accountants and finance teams have a unique view of the entire business and being able to leverage this perspective is key.
That can mean being proactive in anticipating potential issues and proposing solutions, being part of key decisions/analyses on the business side and providing that unique perspective to the whole organization.
It’s so easy for Finance teams to be seen as the department of "no".
Finance teams have been overwhelmed with transactional work, leaving little time for strategic input. When you're manually reconciling thousands of transactions, it's hard to look up and see the bigger picture.
Fortunately, it's possible to switch from defense to offense and enable growth rather than restrict it.
It just takes the right tools.
Let automation handle the transactions so your team can focus on transformation. Your strategic insight is too valuable to be buried in spreadsheets.
Blue Onion’s founder, Lyndsey Bunting is no stranger to playing defense in accounting. As VP of Finance at Birchbox where she experienced the challenges of manual processes and the limitations of outdated ERP systems. As CFO at Resonance Companies she encountered the data challenges, limitations, and lack of modern solutions for accountants.
“
Retail and ecommerce accounting teams shouldn’t have to waste hours manually reconciling transactions. Yet, with funds flowing across multiple systems—order platforms, payment processors, and banks—matching every order to its cash settlement is a major challenge.
I’ve been there: navigating audits, conducting due diligence, and handling complexities of scaling financial operations. I’ve also helped multiple startups build finance processes that support sustainable growth.
Eliminating manual effort, and providing transaction visibility. Our platform seamlessly integrates with your existing systems to ensure accurate, audit-ready financials.”
The most successful businesses today have finance teams that shape strategy, not just report it in retrospect.
But this shift isn't possible when your team is buried in manual reconciliation and transaction matching.
What accounting teams today need is:
Real-time financial visibility
Automated transaction matching
Connected revenue sources
Proactive problem-solving
Tracking cash flow patterns
Strategic insight delivery
The question is: will you continue to let manual processes hold your business back, or embrace automation to tap into your team's strategic potential?
If you’re looking to do the latter, book time with one of Blue Onion’s experts today.
Connect with Blue Onion on LinkedIn for insights and the latest in automated financial operations.
