From generals standing on top of hills with telescopes to modern-day satellite imagery, there’s a very good reason why military strategists have always favoured a high vantage point.
To make the best decisions you need to be able to see the full picture. You need to know the lay of the land.
It’s a similar story for ecommerce businesses. Selling online often means digging into a lot of financial detail. We log in to websites, marketplaces, ad accounts, analytics, marketing tools, banks, credit cards, payment gateways, and many more platforms to gather information. But all too often we don’t get the full picture. It’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing each of these things in isolation. In reality, they should be viewed as small parts of a greater whole.
Let’s look at some of the benefits of zooming out to get a financial overview of your e-commerce business.
1. Seeing all of your balances and spend in real time
Having all of your real-time financial data available at a glance is the most obvious benefit of a financial overview. That’s what you get from Juni’s smart dashboard. It instantly removes the silo effect we touched on above so you can view everything in context.
Juni integrates with more than 2,400 tools and platforms, including PayPal, Stripe, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Wise, and Xero. All the data from all of your key accounts can be monitored from one place. This helps you to track your cash flow in a way that is straightforward to understand.
That’s important because a recent study found that 55% of small business owners experience higher levels of stress when using cash management systems provided by their bank. With all the figures in front of you, it’s easier to see potential problems looming and take calm, considered action before it’s too late.
2. Cutting your admin burden
Research shows small businesses spend around 15 hours a week on financial admin. For companies handling significant amounts of media buying, that figure is likely to be a dramatic underestimate.
Logging in and out of different accounts, manually exporting the data you need and uploading it somewhere else… takes time. If you have that data in one place, it will save you hours wasted on admin. You can put your time and resources to much better use on other parts of your business.
3. Reducing your customer acquisition cost
When you look at the cost-per-action (CPA) on your Google Ads account, that’s only considering your ad spend. It values all the work and time you’re putting in behind the scenes at precisely zero. That means your customer acquisition cost (CAC) is actually far higher than would ever show up in your analytics.
You can lower this hidden CAC by reducing the time you spend managing Google Ads. Bidbrain’s AI bidding technology is a good example of this. Another is Juni’s Google Ads integration. By automating receipt generation to automatically pull monthly invoices and bring all your spend into a single dashboard, you’ll spend less time on Google Ads admin.
4. Getting ad spend insights
Juni’s Google Ads integration and Facebook Ads integration give you even greater spend insights, so you can make better decisions. You get high-level data on your total spend, plus detailed information on each account.
The insights can be used to find more ways of cutting CAC. With a centralised overview of your Google Ads spend, you can use Juni’s spend insight function to get a valuable analysis of your ad accounts. If you have multiple accounts — for different currencies, stores or clients — this is even more useful because everything is in one place.
5. Monitoring multi-currency spending
Chances are your ecommerce business is spending in more than one currency. If you’re media buying in multiple markets, it’s another complication when keeping track of your spend.
With a thorough financial overview of your business, you can easily compare how you’re performing in different currencies. And if you’re using multi-currency accounts, you can use these insights to move funds around your business quickly and with low FX fees.
6. Finding out where you’re spending and analysing ROAS
Surely you should know what you’re spending money on, right? It’s not always that simple. You have payment cards hooked up to various ad accounts — spending in multiple currencies — plus PayPal payments, subscriptions and various other transactions to think about. You can get lost in the details.
With a consolidated view of your ecommerce finances, seeing transactions grouped together gives you a clearer picture of your spend with each company. Maybe those frequent small transactions with one ad network will suddenly look expensive compared to the monthly invoice from another one.
This also makes it simple to track return on ad spend (ROAS). As we mentioned, all of your transactions will be grouped together so you can see not only individual payments, but also a broader picture. Google estimates you should see an $8 profit on every $1 spent on Google Ads. By comparing ROAS across different ad networks, you can target spend to cut CAC and deliver better results.
7. Accessing credit more easily
With an up-to-date and comprehensive financial overview of your ecommerce business, it’s easier to demonstrate your creditworthiness to lenders. Open banking connections give you the flexibility to collate your financial data in one place. This allows for faster applications, less admin, and better credit decisions.
A knock-on effect of accessing credit more easily is that it's more straightforward to scale your ad spend. And that means it's easier to scale your business.
A clearer picture of liquidity and cash flow, and detailed ROAS insights help you to scale in two ways. Firstly, by using the data to cut acquisition costs and improve ad performance, you can free up some of your budget to buy more ads and bring in more sales. Secondly, you can easily prove that you would be able to deliver a return from an increased credit line.
Get a better financial overview of your business
Getting a better financial overview means getting improved insights into your ecommerce business. Those insights can be used to make better spending decisions, cut acquisition costs, and scale your business.
To bring all your accounts into a single dashboard and get spend insights tailored to ecommerce businesses, get Juni.
