Rebuilding the Finance Function Behind an Iconic Health and Beauty Brand

The Situation

The brand is a household name in health and beauty, with the distribution, customer loyalty, and growth trajectory that most consumer companies spend decades trying to build. The finance department behind it had not kept pace. While the brand grew, the accounting function stayed roughly where it had been years earlier, running on the same ERP, the same manual processes, and the same small group of people who knew where everything was.

The trigger for the engagement was a resignation. The company’s long-tenured CFO gave two weeks’ notice. With that notice, the owner faced the immediate loss of the one person who understood how the finance function operated, and the prospect of discovering what that function actually looked like without them.

The Challenge

Once inside, we found a finance department whose problems were structural and had been accumulating for years:

• An antiquated ERP that could not support the reporting, inventory, or margin visibility the business needed, and that the team had built manual workarounds to live with
• Weak controllership, with a close that was late, unreconciled, and dependent on spreadsheets outside the system
• No cash visibility. The company operated across an unnecessarily large number of bank accounts, and a disproportionate share of the finance team’s time went to moving money between them and manually tracking balances rather than managing the business
• Inventory that had grown excessively bloated with no reporting on turns, aging, or excess and obsolete exposure by SKU
• No margin knowledge. The owner could not see gross-to-net by channel, contribution margin by SKU or product line, or what the trade spend and returns embedded in revenue were actually costing
• Manual processes throughout: reconciliations, accruals, inventory tracking, and reporting all built by hand every month

The business ran by fire. Each day was spent reacting to cash, inventory, and reporting problems that a functioning finance department would have prevented, and the owner had no meaningful information with which to run a brand of this size.

What We Did

Buxbaum placed an interim CFO and an interim controller into the company, with a sequenced mandate: stabilize first, then modernize.

Reporting catch-up. The first priority was to bring financial reporting current. We rebuilt the close, reconciled every balance sheet account, and produced the financial statements the company had been missing, so that the owner had a reliable baseline before anything else was changed.

Cash and treasury. We consolidated the bank account structure to the accounts the business actually needs, established a daily cash position and a rolling 13-week cash forecast, and eliminated the manual transfers and tracking that had consumed the team. Cash management moved from a daily emergency to a standing report.

Inventory and margin visibility. We built inventory reporting by SKU covering on-hand, turns, aging, and excess and obsolete exposure, giving the owner the first clear view of how much capital was tied up and where. Alongside it, we established gross-to-net and contribution margin reporting by channel and product line, so that trade spend, returns, freight, and fulfillment costs are visible against the revenue they support.

Automation and AI enablement. With reporting current, we began replacing the manual processes that had consumed the department: automated bank reconciliation, rules-based accrual and prepaid schedules, AI-assisted transaction classification and variance flagging, and reporting that draws from the ledger rather than from spreadsheets rebuilt each month. Each automated process is one less dependency on any single person’s knowledge.

ERP upgrade. The legacy ERP was the root of much of the manual work, so we scoped and began the upgrade to a system capable of supporting the brand’s inventory, channel, and reporting requirements, designed so that the automation built during the engagement carries forward rather than being rebuilt.

The Result

The engagement is ongoing. Financial reporting is current and reconciled for the first time in years. Cash is visible daily and forecast weekly rather than managed by hand across accounts nobody could explain. The owner can see inventory exposure and margin by product and channel, and is making decisions on the basis of that information rather than in reaction to the latest fire.

The finance team’s time is shifting from manual mechanics to analysis as automation takes hold, and the ERP upgrade will remove the platform constraint that made the old way of working necessary. The company is building a finance function that matches the brand it supports and that would hold up to a lender, an investor, or a buyer on any given day.

Why It Matters

Iconic brands often outgrow the finance functions that served them when they were small, and the gap stays hidden as long as the people who built the workarounds stay in place. A resignation, an illness, or a transaction exposes it all at once.

The lesson is not that the outgoing CFO failed. It is that a finance function built around people rather than processes and systems is a liability the owner cannot see until the people leave. Automating the mechanics, modernizing the platform, and making the numbers visible turns that liability into an asset, and does so before the next departure rather than after.

If your finance department depends on a few people and a system nobody wants to touch, let’s talk about what it would take to make your numbers current, visible, and independent of who happens to be in the chair.