Patagonia

A 250-store retail operation reconciled to a single GL across four tools — Concur for expenses, Floqast for close, custom Python scripts for bank rec, and a 7-tab spreadsheet nobody wanted to inherit.

Solution

Atlas Reconcile and Insights replaced the bank rec scripts and the spreadsheet entirely. Pulse alerting was layered on top of inventory turnover, store-level same-store-sales, and gross margin variance.

Results

“We replaced four reconciliation tools and one spreadsheet that nobody wanted to own.”

The full story

Patagonia's finance team supports 250+ retail stores across North America, EMEA, and Japan, plus a wholesale and direct-to-consumer ecommerce arm. Pre-Atlas, the close ran 11 business days and required four different tooling surfaces. The bank rec alone took the senior accountant the better part of a Wednesday.

The Atlas onboarding ran six weeks. The first two weeks were spent connecting NetSuite, the bank feeds, Stripe, and the custom in-store POS data warehouse. Weeks three through five were spent modelling the metric layer: same-store sales, inventory turnover, gross margin, store contribution margin. Week six, Pulse alerting went live on the priority metrics.

Three months in, the close had dropped to 5 days. The biggest win wasn't the reconciliation automation per se — it was eliminating the cross-tool drift. "Same number, four different definitions across four tools" was the recurring quarterly complaint, and Atlas's metric layer eliminated it in one stroke.

The single biggest catch in FY25 was a $1.8M inventory write-down that Pulse flagged in week 9 of Q3. The signal was a same-store-sales decline in three Pacific Northwest stores combined with rising returns rates on a single SKU line — Atlas surfaced it 7 weeks before it would have been caught in the year-end physical inventory.