cool things i’ve made

Case Study 1: Simplifying Expense Reporting

Problem:

Until 2018, the whole company shared one credit card. Employees used it for anything they’d be reimbursed for, managers used it for department supplies, and photos of the card details got passed around the office. It got hit with fraud often, and every time the card was cancelled, purchasing stopped for days until the replacement arrived. Receipts went missing and nobody really owned their purchases, so coding mistakes were constant.

Solution:

I rolled out Ramp and set it up around how the company actually works. Each team got spend programs tied to their budget and our policies, and employees could get approvals quickly, request new spend and upload their receipts in one place. I connected Ramp to our accounting software, so my team stopped spending hours every week chasing receipts and coding card transactions. The coding errors stopped too.

Methods:

  • We had almost no budget for new software, so paid options were out

  • I surveyed a group of employees about how they buy things and how they like to handle receipts

  • I demoed Ramp and tested a few processes with the purchasing team

  • Once testing went well, I rolled it out to the whole company and ran an all-hands training

Case Study 2: Modernising Reporting

Problem:

Many companies still build their reports by hand each quarter. It takes hours of detail work and leaves plenty of room for error. At Heckler, that meant pulling an already stretched team away from their work to prepare reports based on old numbers that weren’t much help for decision-making.

Solution:

You get a dashboard! You get a dashboard! Everybody gets a dashboard!

I built live dashboards for everyone who needed one. The owner gets the overall picture, procurement can see inventory levels, and sales has its customer metrics. Nobody has to wait for a quarterly report anymore to see the numbers they make decisions with.

Methods:

  • I worked out who needed a dashboard and where each one would pull its data from

  • I tried a few dashboard tools before settling on Grow.com

  • I sat down with each department to hear what they needed, then built and connected their dashboards

Case Study 3: Sorting Out Sales Tax, GST and Duties

Problem:

Every US state has its own sales tax rates and rules, and its own returns to file. For a small business selling nationwide, that adds up to a lot of hours, and the company didn’t have the people or the budget to keep up. Selling into Canada and other countries added GST/HST, import duties and other taxes on top of that.

Solution:

I went through our sales and customer data and figured out exactly which states we’d fallen behind in. Then I worked through them one by one to get the company compliant, and negotiated penalty waivers with the states.

Going forward, Avalara calculates and charges the right tax across our sales channels, and flags us before we cross a new state’s threshold.

It wasn’t just the US, either. I also handled GST/HST for our Canadian sales, and managed the duties and taxes on our other international orders.

Methods:

  • I pulled up to five years of sales by state, plus exempt customers and each state’s rules

  • I ranked the states by risk and how much we could owe

  • I worked down that list, filing voluntary disclosure agreements, registering where we needed to and catching up on returns

Case Study 4: Protecting Cash Through COVID

Problem:

When COVID hit, demand for office hardware dropped fast and Heckler’s revenue fell about 30%. Meanwhile, the company had been doing real product design and engineering for years without claiming the R&D tax credit.

Solution:

I brought in cash from two places. First, I secured two PPP loans of $250,000 each, tracked every dollar against the program rules, and prepared both forgiveness applications. Both loans were forgiven. I also found the R&D tax credit option through Gusto, and working with their R&D credit team, we went back through six years of records and claimed over $380,000 in federal and state credits. That’s about $880,000 in total. It bought inventory and kept the whole team on payroll with no cut hours, and we were even able to give a few people raises in 2020.

Methods:

  • I worked out what we qualified for under PPP from payroll records and applied through our lender

  • I tracked eligible payroll and costs separately, which made both forgiveness applications straightforward

  • I compared a few R&D credit providers and chose Gusto because they understood our business and wouldn’t bury me in extra reporting

  • I pulled together six years of records for the R&D claim and worked with our founder on the technical design questions

  • Gusto wrote up the R&D side of the story: Read the case study

Case Study 5: Buying and Building Our Own Space

Problem:

Heckler was growing and needed space of its own. Buying property is one of the biggest financial decisions a private company makes. It ties up cash and adds debt, and it has to make sense to both the owner and the bank.

Solution:

I led the financial side of two property projects: a new build of about $6 million, and an existing building we bought and renovated for about $500,000. I did the due diligence and risk assessment on both, put together what our lenders needed, and managed the construction loan draws so both projects stayed funded.

Methods:

  • I modelled what each project would do to our cash and debt

  • I worked through the risks with our advisers and legal counsel

  • I prepared the financial packages our lenders needed

  • I checked contractor invoices against budget before each construction draw