Industry characteristics
- Operating across multiple platforms, each with its own settlement rules and payment cycles;
- Fragmented flows with a long list of refunds, discounts and platform service fees;
- Advertising, influencer and content spend often lacking compliant documentation.
Key exposures
- Inconsistent revenue conventions, so the books diverge from the real scale of business;
- Promotion and content spend hard to document, leaving costs unaggregated;
- Fabricated transactions used to inflate sales, which pull platform turnover far away from real revenue — a practice to be avoided outright, because the legacy burden is extremely costly to unwind;
- Inventory out of step with the records, with returns and shrinkage unaccounted for.
How we work
- Consolidate platform settlement statements into one verifiable revenue basis;
- Build a documentation process for promotion spend, starting with whether documents can be obtained at all;
- Standardise the accounting for returns, discounts and shrinkage so stock and books agree;
- Bring it into management accounting to see real margin by channel and category, not just platform turnover.