Learn how Amiko & Friends saves time, reduces cost, and gains business critical insight using Millentic

Amiko & Friends (https://amikoandfriends.com) operates a membership club for horse lovers to be able to shop premium equestrian gear and accessories at cost-plus prices. With a novel idea of providing quality equipment to loyal fans through memberships, there are multiple challenges that arise related to their business model. These challenges include keeping track of order+payment data to monitor performance, and complying with accounting practices that follow from selling yearly subscriptions. 

Saving time from automated order+payment data collection and harmonization

Before Millentic, the team at Amiko & Friends used to download reports from payment providers manually and compile the data in a large excel file with multiple sheets, using for purpose formulas and copy pasting of data to just get the data in one place. While this is not a bad exercise to get a sense of control, it does take time that could be used for something more valuable and is prone to errors. The reason why this should generally not be done manually is because it’s a repetitive process. Anything repetitive that involves collecting and compiling data, can and should be automated. 

With Millentic, the transaction data generated from orders, payments, refunds and other transaction related events is now all automatically collected and harmonized into one general homogenous format. Commas, dates and decimals are consistent. Foreign exchange rates are applied automatically according to preference. All data points that Amiko & Friends ever wanted are right there – sorted, cleaned, accessible, searchable and readable in one place. It can be downloaded for ad hoc analysis in spreadsheets, but there is no need. There’s more…

The data is also enriched with custom fields added to new columns, that uses existing data to calculate fit for purpose data points, later to be used for accounting and analyses.

Reducing cost by leveraging automated revenue recognition and tax reporting 

Before Millentic, Gustav and team would just send over the compiled data in a file to their accounting firm. While this did facilitate the production of accounting journals for the accounting firm, they still had to do quite a bit of extra manual work to get the journals ready. 

With Millentic, accounting journals for revenue recognition and European tax reporting are generated automatically. Eventually, Amiko & Friends aims to automate end-to-end every transaction recording into their accounting system to get real-time bookkeeping of revenue, but there is a strength in the Millentic approach, that Amiko & Friends could start their automation journey by beginning with automating the current processes as they are. 

After having been burnt by testing other data and automation platforms before Millentic, they were really careful to not over-automate their accounting to start with. Instead, they see that sequential automation, as offered by Millentic, improves operational efficiency without losing the sense of control. 

Not to mention the recognition and accounting of deferred revenue that follows sales of yearly subscriptions. This adds multiple layers of complexity to both data harmonization and automation that requires a high level of customizability. Millentic solves this problem without hazzle.

The end result of the above is that Amiko & Friends saves direct cost from reduced billings from their accounting firm. The funny part is that the accounting firm is really happy about this added bandwidth as well, since it enables them to bring on more clients.

Gaining business critical insights, with all of the above

In a new business that springs from such a novel idea as selling cost-plus shopping memberships, accurate data to produce valuable insights are crucial for decision making at any given moment and time frame. 

Amiko & Friends leverages harmonized transaction data and automated accounting to measure performance of their topline revenue, product category sales distribution and clarification of transaction related costs such as payment and foreign exchange fees. 

“Millentic enables us to finally get clarity on a continuous basis of how our business is actually performing to be able to make critical decisions, without having to wait for monthly book-closing. Accurate and readable pre-accounting data reflects the business’ performance much better than reports from our accounting system. The additional insight on granular and aggregated levels in transaction cost is a nice add-on and something we will definitely dive into in the future.” 

-Gustav Norlenius, co-founder and COO at Amiko & Friends