E-commerce
An online retailer automates everything customer-facing and then does the finance in a spreadsheet. Payouts arrive net of commissions, refunds and adjustments that nobody unpicks; stock is counted in two places that disagree; and the person who knows how it all ties together is the founder. This page is which of those desks has a live agent reporting to it today, and which of them does not.
5 of the 7 back-office roles below have a live agent reporting to them today. The rest are listed because they exist in this business, not because we cover them.
Supplier bills, fulfilment invoices and platform fees arrive in one inbox and are paid on the assumption that they are right.
Finance Operations holds wrongly taxed, duplicated and unmatched bills before the payment run with the evidence attached, and drafts the supplier query.
A payout lands as one number. Working out which orders it covers, and what was taken out of it, is a manual exercise that mostly does not happen.
Revenue & Cash Assurance ties settlement lines to the ledger and names the gaps. Note the limit below: this works today against payment and bank records, not against a marketplace payout report, because no marketplace connector exists yet.
Stock is tracked in the back-office system and again in each sales channel, and the two are reconciled when something oversells.
Supply & Inventory Operations drafts purchase orders with days of cover attached, proposes transfers before a second purchase, and flags duplicate and malformed catalog records that make both numbers wrong.
Contribution per channel is a question answered with a spreadsheet, rebuilt from scratch every month by the person least able to spare the time.
Management Accounting & Close puts the close blockers on the desk on day one, lists the accruals, explains what moved in cost of sales, and drafts the management pack for a person to sign.
A small team, often part contractor, with contracts and bank details kept wherever they were first typed.
HR & Payroll Operations catches expiring permits, duplicate bank accounts and missing contracts before the payroll run rather than after a failed payment.
Refunds are processed in the storefront and land in the ledger as a net figure, so the cost of returns per channel is not a number anyone holds.
No agent covers this yet. A person still does all of it.
Sales-tax or VAT returns are prepared by hand, across channels that each report differently. Marketplace tax collection rules differ by country and are not universal.
No agent covers this yet. A person still does all of it.
E-commerce back offices are not short of data, they are short of a common key. The order exists in the storefront, the money exists in the payout, the cost exists in the supplier bill, and the stock exists in two systems. Nothing joins them except a person with a spreadsheet, and that person is doing it after hours.
The specific loss is margin you cannot see. Commission and fee structures change and nobody notices because the payout is still a plausible-looking number. Refunds are netted, so return rates hide inside revenue. A product that oversells costs a cancelled order and a customer. None of this appears in the profit and loss as a line called the problem.
All five live agents apply, but read the honest limit first: the payout reconciliation that matters most in this industry is only partly covered, because it runs today against payment and bank records rather than a marketplace report.
Keeps stock available without over-buying, catches purchasing problems early, and protects gross margin.
What it does →Prevents avoidable payments, catches invoice and VAT errors before the payment run, and keeps cash and the audit trail visible.
What it does →Checks that what the tills recorded, what the bank received and what the ledger posted agree, and hands you every place they do not.
What it does →Finds everything standing between today and a closed month on day one, instead of one thing at a time across a week.
What it does →Catches what is wrong in an employee's file, documents or payment details before a regulator, a bank or an unpaid employee makes it obvious.
What it does →Every agent runs the same code for every business. What changes is what your connected systems contain, and that decides what an agent finds.
Overnight, the agents read what they can actually reach: the accounting records, the bank lines, the stock and product records, and the employee files. Supplier and fulfilment bills are matched and three are held, one of them a duplicate fulfilment invoice for the same week. Bank lines are tied to the ledger and two deposits do not have a matching entry. The catalog scan finds nine products with duplicate records, which had split the stock figure for each of them, and two reorders are replaced with a transfer. What does not happen is the thing you probably want most: no agent opened your marketplace, because no connector to one exists yet. Until it does, the payout arrives as a number and stays one.
Nothing in that run executes on its own. Each drafted action waits in the approvals queue for a person on your team, and above a set amount the owner has to sign.
Need one of these first? Tell us.
Three minutes, no card, no account. You get a verdict for that role, a task map with a reason per task, and the matching live agent if there is one.