eCommerce Accounting Where Almost Right Is Not Good Enough with Parag Mamnani of Webgility

Yeah, I mean, that's such a great story, and I, you know, I'm a big believer in EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System.

Which In that you kind of come up with your three uniques, and I can say that I haven't seen an agency out there that has done kind of that full-service model where especially the financial side, I think, you know, w-we have a content business now, and we kind of try to help customers with that full cycle.

Uh, but talk a little bit about why that, that kind of came up in your, in your purview of what, why the, the financial part, why, why you feel it's so important.

I know why it's so important, but kind of [chuckles] let's hear from you.

Yeah.

I, I think it's the sort of the conflation of sort of two key themes, right? Number one, as you look at e-commerce and just online selling in general, merchants have to be multi-channel in order to be successful.

A single channel does... can get you started, but you can't scale with just selling on one channel, right? You have to be, uh, present in a lot of different places.

And what that naturally means is that you're gonna have data and complexity, different payment methods, different fulfillment processes, just a lot of different workflows.

And the more data you have, the more complexity you're gonna have in your financials.

So the real problem is how do you bring all of this data together? And then ultimately, how do you make sense of it so that you can make more money? And so Webgility, you know, started off with kind of these three core pillars.

I wrote it down on the proverbial napkin.

It was, you know, integration, automation, and insights.

As we, you know, looking back, we started, you know, I started the company now almost two decades ago.

I could see that merchants would need a lot more connections and integrations 'cause they'd need to connect to more systems and channels.

And I felt that, uh, ultimately, if you had so many disparate systems, automation and workflows would be paramount.

And then if you're swimming in all of this data and you actually can't find the signal and all the noise, without insights, you couldn't really win.

And so fast-forward a couple of decades, this is exactly where we see ourselves.

You know, now everything can connect to everything.

There's a lot of tools out there for automation, and we are, you know, flooded with business analytics tools and dashboards and reports.

But really, what's your system of truth? How do you look at your financial data, and how do you make sense of it to extract where the real opportunities for margins are? That, I'm afraid, is still being done by most businesses largely on an Excel spreadsheet.

So, you know, the problem has only gotten bigger, and we continue to find, you know, better and better ways to solve it.

And, and yeah, I'm, I'm happy to, of course, share that over the years, we've also learned that customers not just, you know, they don't just need the platform, but they also need the human expertise.

And so we've built a team of accountants in-house, and, you know, we can f- do the full gamut and really help businesses make sense of their financials.