I’m soooo excited to write this post - the team at Settle has always been on a mission to help CPG brands scale faster and more profitably and today, we take that mission to another level.
You’ve known us for years as the leading working capital financing partner for CPG businesses. You’ve probably also known that there’s no better way for brands to pay their bills and manage their AP than Settle. Well, starting now, get to know Settle as the best place for CPG brands to manage their end-to-end procurement and inventory operations as well! That’s right, the days of crazy spreadsheets, copy and pasting data from one system to another, and not trusting the result are over. Read on to learn how you and your teams can grow without adding headcount, save money, and understand your costs and margins by building your CPG operations on Settle.
Look what you made us do…
”I’m drowning in spreadsheets!”
“I don’t know / don’t trust my landed costs?”
“Too many POs, too many inventory locations, too many SKUs - as the business grows, my systems and spreadsheets can’t keep up.”
Sound familiar? We kept hearing these challenges from brand after brand, so we decided to fix procurement and inventory for y’all. Look what you can do now when you build your CPG operations on Settle:
Digital, automated procurement:
Tired of updating spreadsheets, Shopify, your WMS and your vendors when you add or change a SKU? We get tired just thinking about all that manual, error-prone work, so we built the Settle Universal Catalog - one place to manage all your finished goods, raw materials, BOMs, and variations. What makes the Universal Catalog so great?
- All your items in one place: Yup, finished goods, raw materials, BOMs we’ve got ‘em. Do you have lots of different sizes, colors, flavors, etc - we built the Universal Catalog to handle all your variations. Are you a kit to stock or kit to order kind of brand - we’ve got you covered there too!
- SKU Translator: Whatever your channel, vendor, or WMS calls a SKU, you can store them all on the same record in Settle so your sales, order and inventory counts always line up (sorry all you vlookup wizards - you’re gonna have to go apply your skillz elsewhere)
- Super synced: Get started by syncing Settle to Shopify or your WMS and then watch us automatically keep Settle, your sales channels and your WMS synced together as you make changes
- Embedded in all your procurement docs: Building a PO, Work Order, Inventory Transfer or Invoice - just start typing and your catalog items auto-populate. Bye-bye spelling mistakes, shipment mistakes and wasted time emailing back and forth
Struggling to track all your communications with manufacturers and 3PLs? We hear ya - get it all done faster in Settle. Now you can issue, update and collaborate on Purchase Orders, Work Orders, and Inventory Transfers all in Settle. The best part? We automatically update your inventory and cash flow information as you update each document. Did you just cut a new PO to prevent an out of stock? Now your whole team sees the incoming inventory alongside your on hand inventory in Settle. Moving inventory from your warehouse to your FBA? Struggling to remember when each partial payment on each PO is due? Settle has you covered - make your deposit and progress payments right from the PO!
Automated receiving:
Are you worried you’re not receiving all the units you specified on your PO? Not sure whether your coman updated pricing on their latest invoice? Struggling to find the time to do a line item by line item review of every shipment receipt, invoice and PO? We hear you. So we made Settle’s automated three way match (3WM) even better! Now Settle automatically pulls in the line item details of your shipment receipts from your WMS, automatically matches them with the right PO and invoice AND automatically finds any quantity or price discrepancies. All you need to do is email your vendor and request your credit. (Oh, and we make it easy to track and use those vendor credits too! 👀 we see you CFOs out there)
Simple, easy inventory management and forecasting
Wait, you thought we were done? Nope! Just getting started! Now you can see, manage and forecast your inventory in Settle, by SKU, by location and by channel. No more spending hours every day logging into 5 different systems just to know your inventory balances - we automatically pull balances from all your warehouse locations. We show you the inbound from your POs (with expected arrival date). We help you manage transfers within Settle and auto update balances at each location. We connect to your sales channels like Shopify, Amazon, and Walmart eCommerce and keep inventory updated based on sales. We take a look at lead times, on hand, on order and historical demand and automatically tell you which SKUs are getting close to stocking out and we make it fast and easy to place that replenishment PO from the same system. Imagine what you’ll do with the hours you and your team get back in your week!
Real-time landed costs, accurate COGS
We know it - CPG is all about margins and profitability now. We want you and your team to spend much less time calculating Landed Costs, COGS, margins and profitability and much more time growing your margins. With this release, you can quickly and accurately calculate Landed Costs on every PO - even if the shipping, duties and other bills haven’t come in yet. When they do come in, it’s drag and drop easy to update the additional expenses and see the impact of your revised Landed Costs throughout the system. Do you have a bunch of cost reduction projects on the go? Pull up any SKU in your Universal Catalog and easily see the Landed Cost trend over time. There’s more! We also help you get accurate financials done every month with our EOM Inventory Report - showing you, your accountant and your bookkeeper starting and ending inventory balances, accurate COGS and needed adjustments - right at your fingertips. Know your margins, grow your margins - that’s our philosophy!
Faster, better payments - in the same platform
Don’t you get tired of copying invoice and payment info from your AP system into your spreadsheets or IMS? Mistakes get made, duplicates get created - why can’t it all just work together? It can and it does in Settle. Not only do you get all of the best in class AP automation you’ve always known us for (schedule bills, manage approval processes, auto-reconcile with accounting), now we also:
- Auto-link payments and POs: No more AP scrambling to find a PO to match a payment with. No more bookkeepers spending hours figuring out how to categorize a PO deposit. With Settle, now you simply initiate a standalone payment right from the PO, we link the payment and PO and ensure the journal entries get done right, the first time.
- Fast, easy, reconciled standalone payments: Need to make a payment without an invoice? Want to make sure the accounting gets done right? We do too! Now you can make standalone, invoice-less payments in Settle and automatically reconcile them into QuickBooks or NetSuite.
Still the best transparent and non-dilutive working capital for CPG around:
Lest we forget, in addition to all of the powerful procurement, inventory and payments capability now built into Settle, we’re also still the best financing partner around for growing CPG brands across the US.
OK, that’s it for now. If you made it this far, you must be interested. So if you want to learn more, find a “Talk to our team” button and see how much time and money you can save by building your CPG operations on Settle. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, we’re not even close to being done. The team is already heads down, hustling and making all of the above even better - watch this space for more updates. Keep hustling!
