The challenge
SUITSUIT is a Dutch travel-luggage brand selling direct-to-consumer through its own Shopify storefront and across marketplaces like Bol.com, Zalando and Kaufland. After a major restructuring, the business runs lean: a finance team of three reporting into Celia Schmitz, finance director (ex-KPMG RA). They run accounting in Exact Online, channel sales through Channel Engine, and handle payments across Mollie, PayPal and platform-specific rails.
Celia wanted real management reporting: consolidated P&L, budget-vs-actuals, channel margin, warehouse capacity. All surfaced in dashboards her co-directors would actually open. The problem was not the data; it was the path to the dashboard.
Her team had tried two things. First Power BI, then a Google Looker Studio build with an in-house IT person. Both stalled for the same reason: the engineer had little finance affinity, and every change request became a translation exercise.
If I want a dashboard with gross margin instead of net margin, I first have to explain to the IT person what the difference is. Then I'm explaining 'gross margin is revenue minus cost of goods.' That's not where my time should go.
Celia Schmitz, Finance Director, SUITSUIT
Meanwhile the day-to-day kept eating finance hours: credit-card statements typed in by hand line by line; pallet capacity tracked by downloading weekly warehouse exports into Excel; invoices manually chased from supplier portals. There was no slack to also build the dashboards on the side.
The solution
Celia first heard about Nance through LinkedIn. The decision criteria were simple: did this remove the translation layer between her and her data?
The answer turned out to be yes. Where Looker had required her to brief an engineer, Nance let her describe the dashboard she wanted in finance language and iterate on it directly. The same surface that built the dashboard could also pick up the recurring back-office work no off-the-shelf module covered: credit-card processing, invoice retrieval, payment reconciliation.
The hesitation was security. With Exact Online, customer data, and bank-level reconciliation in scope, "is our business information now on the street?" was the first question on the table.
The only thing I really had to think hard about was: is this safe? I asked a lot of questions before we said yes.
Celia Schmitz, Finance Director, SUITSUIT
We walked through where the data sits (Google Cloud, EU region), the data-processing agreement, and the fact that Nance does not train on customer data. With that resolved, SUITSUIT moved forward.
How SUITSUIT runs finance ops with Nance
The team's anchor workflow is monthly management reporting. Celia opens a chat, asks Nance for an updated consolidated P&L from Exact Online, requests the cuts she wants by entity, by channel, by margin type, against budget. Nance produces the visual. When directors ask for a different breakdown ("show me gross margin by sales channel instead"), the change is one message away. Once the format is right, the dashboard becomes a recurring task: refreshed and styled in SUITSUIT's brand colours, ready to share each month.
Around that core, the team has stacked a set of recurring automations:
- Credit-card mutations. Statements that used to be typed by hand now flow into Nance, which categorises them, matches them to suppliers and posts them to the bank book in Exact. The team's marketing function travels often and pays for shoots on Amex and Visa: exactly the long-tail of transactions that defied template-based booking.
- Pallet capacity dashboard. Weekly Excel exports from the external warehouse get uploaded to Nance, which renders an occupancy view and surfaces where stock can be consolidated to optimise pallet count.
- Invoice retrieval. Nance walks supplier portals (Meta, Pinterest, Klaviyo) on a schedule and pulls down invoices the team would otherwise chase by hand.
- Payment reconciliation across platforms (in progress). The team is wiring Mollie, PayPal, Shopify and Bol.com so that incoming payments auto-match debtor invoices in Exact instead of landing on a single interim account that has to be cleaned up at month-end.
Three finance team-members work in Nance daily. The pattern is not "an analyst querying a BI tool"; it is "a colleague you ask to do the work."
Nance is a fourth colleague on the finance team. That's how we all describe it.
Celia Schmitz, Finance Director, SUITSUIT
The outcome
The clearest immediate win is the time the team gets back. Manual credit-card processing alone has freed up most of a working day a month. The dashboarding work, which used to bounce between Celia and an engineer, now lives entirely with the finance lead, saving multiple hours a week of coordination.
