LifeStraw filters out financial reporting inefficiencies with Aleph

About LifeStraw

LifeStraw is renowned for its innovative water filtration solutions. Driven by its mission to provide safe drinking water to those who need it most, LifeStraw’s impact extends far and wide, from remote communities to outdoor adventurers and everyday households. LifeStraw’s Give Back program alone has resulted in over 10 million children having access to safe drinking water. 

As LifeStraw’s reach expanded, so did the complexity of its financial operations. The finance team became frustrated by the limitations of their ERP, forcing them to manually extract and manipulate data in Excel. 

It became clear that a more streamlined, efficient solution was needed—an FP&A platform that could match the performance of their innovative filters.

The Challenges

• Financial reporting was heavily reliant on manual exports and processes that swallowed employee time and left more room for human error
• Sales and revenue data in NetSuite wasn’t always clean or complete from channel sources like Shopify and Amazon, further contributing to their reliance on exports
• There were a lot of unique requests from colleagues to slice financial reports in ways that deviated from what their ERP was set up to do or that were needed to meet their audit standards
• They tried other FP&A add-ons for NetSuite that were clunky, and they found themselves going back to their original Excel models and processes 

The Solution & Results

• Eliminated their reliance on exports with a central source of truth for NetSuite, Shopify, and Amazon data that connected directly to their existing spreadsheets
• Cleaned up a lot of messy, historical data using mappings to ensure revenue and sales channels are correctly accounted for, even if the data in NetSuite itself isn’t perfect
• Automated weekly sales order reports by customer, by channel, and all the way down to an item-level view of shipments and inventory
• Gained much more confidence in their numbers while simultaneously eliminating dozens of hours and manual steps every month 

A month-end close makeover

LifeStraw’s month-end close process got a serious upgrade with Aleph. Finance reporting and variance analysis were automated, slashing the time spent on certain close activities from days to minutes.

“Using Aleph to refresh data in Excel has been a massive time saver,” said Joe. “Previously, we would have to re-pull all that data every time a journal entry was added, which was pretty labor intensive.”

The ability to pull P&Ls multiple times a day during the close period improved their collaboration with accounting and allowed them to close months in record time. 

But time savings were not the only gains they were after.

Greater confidence in the numbers

Manually pulling and manipulating data is more than just a time suck—it introduces room for error. Clean, accurate data is a top priority for any finance team, and LifeStraw is no exception.

"The ability to automatically clean NetSuite has been huge.” noted Joe. “For example, we have customers whose historical data is messy. We use Aleph mappings to calculate everything correctly, ensuring the data is formatted the way we want it, even if the data in NetSuite itself isn’t perfect.” 

Better visibility and insights

A CPG company like LifeStraw has plenty of data complexities, such as managing inventory or measuring performance across channels like brick-and-mortar, DTC, and wholesale. 

LifeStraw has built sales order reports in Aleph that refresh on a weekly basis. These reports provide insights into sales by customer, by channel, and all the way down to an item-level view of units shipped and inventory levels.

This flexibility has allowed LifeStraw's finance team to slice and dice data in more ways, monitor a more granular view of their operational health, and make more informed decisions based on accurate, up-to-date information.

“Working with the Aleph team has been great,” said Joe. “It doesn't seem like we’ve hit any major roadblocks.”