Growth on Autopilot: How DUDE Wipes Scaled Retail Finance Operations with Confido

About

DUDE Wipes has spent the last few years in the kind of growth curve most companies only plan for on a whiteboard, growing its revenue by over 100% in the last two years, while growing headcount companywide from 20 to 60 employees, deliberately, as part of a lean growth strategy the company has stuck to since its earliest days. 

Retail finance was no exception. As DUDE Wipes expanded into most of the country's major retailers, including Walmart, Target, Sam's Club, Kroger, Costco, Safeway, Publix, HEB, Meijer, Harris Teeter, etc., the daily work of applying cash and clearing deductions was exactly the kind of repetitive, volume-driven work the company had already decided it could solve by increasing efficiency via automation. Left unaddressed, that work multiplies hours and creates operational inefficiencies; and as DUDE Wipes keeps expanding its retailer footprint, clear insight into trade spend only becomes more critical. 

Challenge

Retail operations that had to scale as fast as the company did. 

DUDE Wipes was already experiencing explosive growth, but they were beginning to accelerate and were still relatively early in their retail finance journey. Every new retailer meant more payments to apply and more deductions to validate every day. That's the kind of volume growth that typically turns into a request for more AR headcount. Instead, DUDE Wipes wanted to make their existing team 10x more productive: their plan was to be on the leading edge of adopting AI tools to automate repetitive tasks, giving them automated daily cash postings, an accurate read on their trade spend, and realtime visibility into their trade accrual. 

In practice, the manual load still fell on a small team. Every day, the accounting team receives hundreds of payments and deductions across all of their major retail partners such as Walmart, Target, and more. Before Confido, this looked like manually logging into each portal, downloading and eyeballing each

piece of backup to determine what it was for and which GL account it should hit, and manually creating transactions in NetSuite. None of it required more judgment as it scaled; it just required more hours, from the same small team. 

Solution

One AI system for cash application and deductions built for true operational scale.

Confido runs cash application, deductions and trade promotion management for DUDE Wipes as one connected system, so retail growth doesn't automatically translate into more AR headcount, more hours lost to manual work, or less time for growing the business. 

The two places manual work piled up fastest were pulling and coding backup for each day's payments, and getting the resulting transactions into NetSuite. Both of these efforts now run through the same underlying AI engine: 

Automated backup retrieval and coding: Confido logs into each retailer portal, pulls the backup for every payment, and codes it to the right GL account automatically, entirely replacing the manual work of opening each piece of backup and figuring out what it was for. 

One-click NetSuite posting: Each day's consolidated queue of payments and decisions pushes to NetSuite with one click, replacing the manual entry that used to follow every backup review. The integration itself took under a week to get live. 

Deduction-to-promotion matching, where it applies: For the promotions DUDE Wipes does run, deductions auto-link to the trade promotion behind them by product, date, and rate. DUDE Wipes gets side-by-side comparisons of forecasted spend, actual deductions, and ROI for every promotion. 

The models keep improving as DUDE Wipes' volume grows: every correction the team makes feeds back into the system, so it needs less manual review over time, not more, even as retail distribution expands. 

“In past roles, I would've had to hire three headcount alone to manage this process in an accurate way. Here, we've been able to maintain a lean team even while our volume has 3xed, while still being able to meaningfully contribute in other areas of the business.” 

— Lindsay Bodeman 

VP, Finance + Accounting, DUDE Wipes 

Results

Scaling revenue, insight, speed, and not headcount.

Since bringing Confido on for cash application, deductions and trade promotion management two years ago, DUDE Wipes has grown its revenue by more than 100% while expanding across most of the

country's major retailers, all with the same accounting team running the process today. But the ROI goes well beyond 10xing team productivity: 

● Month-end close moved faster, since the team isn't reconstructing a month of manual backup review and NetSuite entry before close. 

● Deductions have increased and with Confido each analyst can now handle 3x more deductions

● The team now has meaningful, real-time visibility into trade spend and deduction trends, instead of just clearing the day's queue. 

● Time that used to go to pulling and eyeballing deduction backup now goes to optimizing the business instead of tedious manual review. 

● Confido has also saved DUDE Wipes $300k in headcount cost over the course of the partnership

Want to learn how Confido can streamline your deductions? Book a demo today.