clarity

Alpha Lion Builds a Single Source of Financial Truth with A2X Clarity

About Alpha Lion

Alpha Lion sells high-performance workout supplements through Shopify, Amazon, and wholesale retail partners. Operating in a fast-moving market, the team needed accurate financial data that keeps pace with daily decisions – not just month-end.

Industry

Sports nutrition – workout supplements

ERP

NetSuite (with NetSuite Connector)

Channels

Shopify, Amazon

Countries

Products sold globally

Pain point

Static, once-a-month ERP reporting and manual reconciliation across high-volume channels make it hard to trust the numbers, spot variances, and act fast.

A2X solution

A2X Clarity – Always-on revenue intelligence that unifies Shopify, Amazon, and NetSuite into one source of truth, complete with transaction-level drill-downs and advanced reconciliation, so teams can trust the numbers.

Show Transcript

00:05

My name is Melanie Kors and I’m the controller at Alpha Lion. We sell workout supplements mostly through Shopify, Amazon, and then also direct to wholesale retailers like GNC and Vitamin Shop.

00:18

So before using A2X Clarity, we had just gone through a NetSuite implementation to really bring our financial and operating systems to the next level. During the system transition, we brought over a lot of old manual processes and we were looking for lot of opportunities to improve our financial reporting.

00:38

Our reporting involved just sending management reports from the ERP, which really aren’t dynamic or easy to customize. Also, it was just a once a month activity. We really work in a fast-paced environment. We’re always doing a hundred different things at once and waiting weeks for month and close to make a decision on

01:01

a sales campaign or a project that we were working on, it was just too slow for us.

01:06

A2X Clarity is an easy to set up BI tool for ecommerce companies that allows you to reconcile transactions and create reports all with data transparency due to the ability to drill into every underlying transaction.

01:23

We use A2X Clarity for reconciling figures between our ERP and sales channels. We use it to filter data for month end adjustments and also to generate financial reports for management.

01:35

The information in Clarity is updated on a live basis just every few hours, making it perfect for any reports that need to be checked throughout the month so that we can make decisions as soon as the information is available.

01:49

When using Clarity Reports, there are elements that make it feel like you’re working with a giant pivot table that’s connected to your ERP and sales channel data, making it extremely powerful.

02:02

At any point in the process of creating reports or charts and graphs, you can drill into the details to see the individual transactions. As an accountant, I kind of live by the trust but verify motto. And with Clarity, I can trust the data in the reports because I can verify it.

02:23

For our current setup, to sync data between our sales channels and NetSuite, we use NetSuite Connector. The issue that we continuously run into is that if there’s a variance in the sales figures between NetSuite and Shopify, we had a really difficult time tracing it down to the individual transactions. We knew that part of this variance was because Shopify records sales the moment that the sale happens.

02:48

Whereas NetSuite’s waiting for the item fulfillment to come through, but it was really difficult in manual process and a manual process in order to find the variances. With Clarity, we’re able to easily identify which orders at the end of the month are pending fulfillment and therefore will cause a timing difference between our Shopify and NetSuite reporting. This gets rid of a lot of the questions at month end as to why the report in Shopify doesn’t match NetSuite.

03:43

As a finance team, we were using reports from our ERP, whereas sales and operations were typically using reports from our sales channels. Meaning at the end of the month, there were always questions about mismatches in the data sources that couldn’t be explained fully. But with Clarity, we can now explain those variances with precision. As a result, we’ve been having fewer conversations about data discrepancies as the teams have grown more confident in the data that we’re presenting to them.

03:51

One of our favorite features of A2X Clarity has been the ability to have AI generate reports for us based on a plain English prompt. This feature has made it really easy for our team members, especially those outside of finance, to jump into the tool and get the data and reports that they need instantly.

04:12

It really helps save time during those kind of critical moments in the month-end close where accounting and finance might be focused on other tasks, but team members in marketing or sales are still needing to pull data from Clarity.

04:26

Because we are able to trust the data that A2X Clarity provides across all teams, whether that be finance, accounting, marketing, sales, it means that we’re all speaking from the same source of truth and that we’re driving our decisions off of actuals and not off of we think this happens.

04:46

We have tried other tools in the past, but they were either difficult to set up, lacked the customization features that we wanted, or we were really struggling to understand how the data was appearing in the reports. With Clarity, we have a tool that we can create custom reports and we have full visibility into the source of the data.

05:09

Plus A2X is a trusted name in the ecommerce space. So we felt confident that we’d receive the same great customer service that we’ve experienced using their other products.

05:19

I would recommend A2X Clarity to any controller or finance leader in an ecommerce business that is looking to upgrade their month-end close reporting. From reconciliations to dashboards, Clarity gives us deeper insights into our financials, helping us make better financial decisions for the company’s long-term goals.

The Challenge

After implementing NetSuite, legacy manual processes crept into reporting:

Static reporting cadence – Management reports were exported from the ERP only once a month, which was too slow for campaign and project decisions mid-month.
Reconciliation blind spots – Thousands of monthly Amazon orders posted via NetSuite Connector had to be matched to settlements, and even small variances were challenging to isolate.
Timing differences – Shopify books revenue at order, while NetSuite waits for fulfillment; explaining the gaps took manual hunting.
Cross-team misalignment – Finance worked from ERP outputs while sales and ops used channel dashboards, leading to recurring “why don’t these match?” conversations.

“Waiting weeks for month-end close to make a decision… it was just too slow for us.”

- Melanie Kohrs, Controller, Alpha Lion

The Solution

Alpha Lion adopted A2X Clarity for always-on revenue intelligence, reconciling every sales channel and NetSuite into one source of truth, and giving their teams access to numbers they can trust and act on.

Fast implementation

Connections to Shopify, Amazon, and NetSuite took minutes to set up (existing A2X Core connections could be securely shared, speeding go-live).
Familiar, spreadsheet-like interface made onboarding new teammates quick and easy.

Month-end reporting acceleration

A Clarity variance dashboard flags differences between NetSuite and Amazon settlements at a glance.
Finance can drill into individual transactions to understand and resolve issues in minutes.
A “pending fulfillment” view isolates timing differences that explain Shopify vs. NetSuite discrepancies at period end.
Saved filters on Shopify order tags surface customer service reshipments automatically – with associated costs and even zip code patterns to spot geographic trends.
Granular, customizable reporting unlocks detailed insights – such as profitability by SKU and by kit.
Live data refreshes every few hours keep reports decision-ready throughout the month.

Verifiable data

Ability to drill-down into the underlying transaction data across platforms, so the team can validate any figure on demand.

Self-serve with AI

Non-finance users prompt Clarity in plain English to build custom reports – freeing accounting during month-end close, while empowering marketing and sales.

“By using Clarity to generate month-end reconciliations and reports, we have been able to save countless hours on manual work.”

- Melanie Kohrs, Controller, Alpha Lion

Results

From monthly snapshots to live, drill-down reporting

Impact Area	Before A2X Clarity	After A2X Clarity
Reporting cadence	ERP exports once a month	Live, refreshed every few hours
Reconciling Amazon ↔ NetSuite	Manual matching across thousands of orders	Variances flagged automatically (with drill to order detail)
Shopify vs. NetSuite timing	Difficult to locate pending fulfillments	One-click view of orders causing timing differences
Cross-team alignment	ERP vs. channel data debates	Single source of truth with transparent drill-downs
Self-serve insights	Reliant on finance to pull data	AI-generated reports from plain-English prompts

A Single, Accurate, Always-On Source of Truth

When financial reporting isn’t timely or trusted, decisions stall. This was a scenario Alpha Lion was all too familiar with, as static reports were generated once a month, with the conversation always starting with the same question: “Why doesn’t this match?”

Finance pulled static ERP exports, while sales and ops lived in channel dashboards, and no one could quickly trace where variances came from.

A2X Clarity ends the debate by putting every team on the same reconciled dataset – refreshed every few hours – with drill-down to the underlying order for anything that looks off.

Because every number is verifiable to its source transaction, teams can sample, verify, and align quickly – leading to fewer “why doesn’t this match?” conversations and faster data, resulting in better overall decision-making across the organization.

“Because we are able to trust the data that A2X Clarity provides across all teams, whether that be finance, accounting, marketing, sales, it means that we’re all speaking from the same source of truth and that we’re driving our decisions off of actuals and not off of ‘we think this happens’.”

- Melanie Kohrs, Controller, Alpha Lion

Why A2X Clarity

Data transparency – Every chart and table is traceable to source transactions.
Speed to value – Setup is quick and easy, and the interface feels like a “giant pivot table.”
Team enablement – AI helps non-finance users build exactly what they need without waiting for month-end.
Confidence – Leadership trusts decisions backed by reconcilable actuals.

Looking Ahead

With reconciled, live dashboards and self-serve analytics, Alpha Lion’s teams make faster, better decisions – grounded in the same, trusted set of actuals across finance, sales, and operations.

Ready to replace reconciliation guesswork with drill-down clarity?
Book a demo to see A2X Clarity in action.