Building Your Ecom Finance Team: Who & When to Hire (And How Much to Spend)

Building an ecommerce finance team isn’t as simple as “hire a CFO.” In this video, Geoff (Head of Marketing at A2X) interviews Meryl Johnston (Founder of Bean Ninjas) about who to hire, when to hire them, and how much to budget as your brand scales from first orders to eight figures.

00:00 Building Your Ecommerce Finance Team
02:10 Big misconception – “my accountant does everything”
03:10 Finance roles breakdown – tax, bookkeeping, FC, FP&A, CFO
06:50 Visualising a scaled finance team
07:20 When to hire – stages from startup to scale
10:40 Outsource vs in-house – pros, cons, considerations
13:24 Founder skill-set factor – tailoring the team
15:34 Complexity matters – why model & ops change staffing
17:30 Case study 1 – savvy founder grows $0.5 M → $3 M
22:12 Case study 2 – less-financially savvy founder’s support mix
25:45 Case study 3 – $10 M dropship, low complexity
39:47 How much to spend on your finance team
30:50 Is finance a cost centre or a revenue centre?
32:00 Hiring your first accountant – key questions
33:42 Green vs. red flags – measuring the relationship
37:40 Final takeaways – build to your strengths

General information only – always seek professional advice for your specific circumstances.

🔗 Need an ecommerce-savvy accounting partner? Book a free consult with Bean Ninjas → https://beanninjas.com
🔗 Automate your marketplace & Shopify postings with A2X (free trial) → https://www.a2xaccounting.com

Key Takeaways

When to hire

Startup (first sales – $1M)

• Engage a tax accountant as soon as money hits the bank – compliance can’t wait.
• Add Xero or QBO on day one; plug in A2X when order volume begins to sting.

Scaling ($1M-$5M)

• Bring in a bookkeeper (outsourced is fine) for monthly reconciliations and cost-of-goods accuracy.
• Automate AP and bank feeds so you stop chasing missing receipts.

Established ($5 M-$20 M)

• Hire or contract a controller to “own” the close, produce timely management reports, and supervise bookkeepers.
• Layer on fractional FP&A or CFO support when cash-flow modeling and scenario planning become weekly conversations.

In-house vs. outsourcing your finance team

Consider outsourcing:

• Tax preparation and statutory filings – specialist knowledge, minimal internal context needed.
• Payroll – compliance heavy, low strategic value.
• Fractional CFO or FP&A projects – when you need senior insight, not a full-time salary.

Consider hiring in-house:

• Daily bookkeeping once volume is high enough to keep a seat busy.
• Inventory planning and purchasing – requires intimate product and supplier knowledge.
• A full-time controller as soon as reports slip or you rely on gut feelings more than data.

How much to spend

Meryl’s rule of thumb: budget 1 – 3 % of annual revenue for the finance function.

• Expect the low end if you have limited business complexity (e.g., you dropship or run a single 3PL with <50 SKUs).
• Land near 3% (or higher) if you have a complex business (e.g., you manufacture, carry thousands of SKUs, or manage multiple warehouses).
• Costs jump in “steps” – hiring a controller or senior analyst will bump the percentage for a quarter or two, then flatten as revenue catches up.

Additional tips for hiring your ecom finance team

• Complexity drives headcount, not revenue. A $10M dropshipper may need fewer seats than a $3 M private-label brand with three warehouses.
• Match pay grade to task. Don’t pay CFO rates for bank recs.
• Trust your gut to understand if your team is performing well. If your P&L looks off, it probably is. Wrong numbers are the biggest red flag.
• Consider your financial experience and expertise, and think about where you want to spend time in the business – this can help drive hiring decisions.

Transcript

Geoffrey (00:00)

Hey everyone. My name is Geoff – I’m the Head of Marketing here at A2X, ecommerce accounting-automation software for the world’s leading Shopify, Amazon, eBay, Etsy and Walmart sellers, as well as their accounting partners. And speaking of accounting partners, I’m joined today by Meryl Johnston, who is the founder of Bean Ninjas. If you don’t know who Meryl Johnston is, I’m surprised, because she’s one of the leading voices in ecommerce and cloud accounting in Australia, and we’re so lucky to have her here today.

Bean Ninjas is an accounting firm specialising in bookkeeping, accounting, tax and virtual-CFO services for ecommerce businesses that are looking to scale. Meryl, I just want to say thank you so much for joining us and for sharing your expertise today. Anything that I might have missed on Bean Ninjas, or there that you’d like to add?

Meryl Johnston (00:49)

You’ve done a wonderful intro, thank you, and you’ve nailed it with what we do and the services we provide. The way I describe it, if I’m talking to an ecommerce founder, is that we typically work with brands in the two- to twenty-million annual-revenue range, and often they’re selling on Shopify or Amazon and have created their own product and are trying to build their own brand. Sometimes they will be manufacturing their own, but often the manufacturing is happening somewhere like China, Vietnam or Mexico. So that’s a typical profile.

Geoffrey (01:27)

Awesome. Well, I guess that is a great segue into today’s topic, especially as you start to think about two- to ten-million-dollar brands. The topic that we’re going to talk about is building a finance team at your ecommerce business. We’re going to cover big questions of when you should hire, who you should hire and look for, and how to know if they’re successful. ⁓

So, Meryl, perhaps a good place to start – and this might seem a little unorthodox – but instead of talking about when you should start to consider hiring a finance person for your ecommerce business, what are some of the main misconceptions that business owners have when they start this consideration process?

Meryl Johnston (02:14)

I’d say the first one is that they think my accountant – and that my accountant is going to be able to do everything in the finance team or every function. I like to compare that to if you’re building out a marketing team. You don’t just hire one marketer and they’re great at copywriting, design, web development, email marketing, social media and paid media – that’s not one person; that’s a team. But often founders, when they first start working with an accountant, think my accountant can do everything. So, when building out your team, that is a common misconception. It can evolve from there as they start to have greater requirements outside of meeting tax compliance.

Geoffrey (03:00)

Totally makes sense. And, Meryl, with that misconception in mind, what are the financial functions and potential roles that ecommerce businesses need to consider instead of just the singular accountant?

Meryl Johnston (03:14)

I think it often starts with tax – usually outsourced; you’d work with an accounting firm for this, someone to meet tax compliance. But there are a lot of other roles in there. We’ve got an organisational chart here where you can see the financial-controller function. They’re almost like the quarterback – the traffic controller. They’ll have a lot of people reporting to them in a larger finance team.

As an ecommerce business owner, you’re going to need many of these functions too, which can often be served by a ⁓ bookkeeper to start with.

Accounts payable – paying bills to your suppliers.

Accounts receivable – relevant if you’re wholesaling. If you’re selling through Shopify, you receive the money when the transaction happens, so you don’t have debtors. But if you’ve got wholesale customers with credit terms, someone has to stay on top of invoicing and chasing payments.

Inventory management – if you have a warehouse, someone must receive goods, ensure you got what you were supposed to and that stock isn’t lost.

Bank reconciliation – keeping bank data coming through Xero or QBO up to date and matching it with transactions.

Financial accountant – handles monthly reports that help the business make great decisions, e.g. whether you can afford to hire or which product is most profitable.

Payroll – if you have employees, you need to be compliant in how you pay them and have someone looking after that.

In a larger finance team you would have individual people in each role. That’s challenging for a small business, so you may have one bookkeeper or external accountant covering several functions – or their firm may have multiple people covering those functions for a fixed fee.

The other two roles:

FP&A – if the financial controller coordinates a team looking backwards (reporting on what has happened), FP&A looks forward: forecasting, cash-flow projection.

CFO – a strategic role; specialists report to them, and they look at major decisions within the business.

Another common mistake is a small business thinking they need a CFO when actually they need a financial controller who can give them accurate data. There’s grey area between what a CFO, FP&A specialist and financial controller do.

Don’t worry – you don’t need every single one of these roles immediately. This is how larger businesses build their finance team and something to aim for as you grow. We’ll step through when you might add some of these functions.

Geoffrey (06:50)

Yeah – so a scaled-finance team. I can imagine ecommerce founders watching, white as ghosts, looking at their P&L, margins evaporating, wondering Oh no!. But, Meryl, you made a great point: you build up to this. That segues to our next question: When do ecommerce businesses need to build their finance team and consider all these roles?

Meryl Johnston (07:24)

Great question. When I say finance-team members, I include employees or contractors, plus outsourced providers like accounting firms.

Typically, the first hire is a tax accountant. Once you’re making sales, you’ll have a tax requirement to file – or in Australia, lodge – a return, usually within the first year.

Next, you add accounting software like Xero or QBO. That’s great, but you’re not yet getting decision-making data. The next transition is adding a tool like A2X to automate bookkeeping. Transaction volume is increasing; you want to save time or cost and gain clarity around cost of goods sold, moving to accrual accounting.

Now you’re in the scaling stage. You’re moving from accounting purely for compliance to using it for decisions. Inventory may get more complex – maybe multiple 3PLs, or your own warehouse. At this stage you’re probably working with a bookkeeper, in-house or external.

In the established phase, data requirements rise. The business is larger and more complex; the founder and team need more info to make great decisions. You’ll often see a controller role come in-house or via your external provider.

As the team grows, you separate roles more clearly. A CFO is expensive; you don’t want them doing bank reconciliations. Matching role complexity to pay level makes the finance function efficient and effective.

Geoffrey (10:18)

Totally makes sense. As your business grows and compliance looms – or the taxman comes knocking – you think I need help. ⁓ You mentioned outsourcing versus bringing roles in-house. Why would you choose one or the other?

Meryl Johnston (10:53)

Outsourced pros: you can access senior talent without needing a full-timer; a startup can’t afford a full-time CFO.

Another factor: how much internal knowledge is needed. Tax work needs tax knowledge, not deep business knowledge. On the other hand, inventory planning needs business knowledge.

Roles needing little business-specific knowledge are best outsourced. Payroll is another good outsource: it’s about legislation and process.

Geoffrey: What about bookkeeping?

Meryl: Bookkeeping sits in the middle. It needs some business knowledge and can be outsourced or in-house. Decide whether you have enough work and if you want to manage that person.

Early stage: little in-house beyond the founder. Scaling: likely still outsourced bookkeeping. Some brands hire internally, but that’s often an operations-manager role. Established phase: more roles come in-house; businesses decide what they own and what specialists handle externally.

Geoffrey (13:24)

Nice. The organisational chart you showed is what you build toward, then you decide per role: internal or external. I love your framework – does this require internal knowledge? – to guide that decision.

Meryl Johnston (13:24)

Mm-hmm. One more factor is the founder’s skill set. If the founder has a strong accounting background, they know what needs to happen and can brief an outsource provider well. If the founder is weak in finance, they might benefit from someone in-house managing the outsourced relationship.

Geoffrey (14:07)

Totally makes sense.

So, Meryl, you’ve done a great job of going over what an organisational design could look like for a scaled finance function at an ecommerce business. You then talked about when you should start building that function, what roles to hire at each stage of growth, and whether you should find somebody in-house or outsource. That’s all great, and I feel like if every business were the same, they could follow that exact journey. But the reality is that no two businesses are alike, and I imagine – like most other functions (you used marketing as an example) – the organisational design might be different depending on the needs of the business. No one-size-fits-all approach to a finance team. Do you mind talking about that concept and giving a few real-world examples of how you would customise a finance team for different types of organisations?

Meryl Johnston (15:34)

Absolutely. I’ve put together a couple of examples to walk through. Before we do that, I want to mention how complexity impacts the way you build your finance team. We’ve talked about scale, but the complexity of operations also impacts who you need. If your business is more complex earlier, you may need to scale your team faster than another business at a similar revenue.

Examples of things that add complexity:

Manufacturing vs. buying finished goods – buying raw materials and manufacturing is more complex; there’s more data and tracking.

Running your own warehouse vs. using a 3PL – managing warehousing software, receiving goods, shipping goods – that requires someone on your team.

SKU count – 10,000 SKUs vs. 10 SKUs adds management overhead.

So you may scale your finance team earlier if complexity is high.

Case Study 1 – Financially-savvy founder (17:49)

We’ll start with a new brand doing about $500 k in revenue. They’re manufacturing in China, shipping finished goods to a US 3PL, and selling only in the US via Shopify. The founder is financially savvy.

Tax accountant – external, for compliance.

Bookkeeping & reconciliations – founder does these in Xero/QBO ad-hoc.

Paying suppliers & inventory planning – founder handles ad-hoc.

As revenue grows to $1 M:

Bookkeeping is outsourced monthly to a specialist ecommerce bookkeeper.

Founder receives monthly financial reports from an ecommerce accountant within the same firm.

Cash-flow forecasting spreadsheet managed by the founder (bigger orders require deposits well in advance).

At $3 M revenue and transitioning to their own warehouse:

Bookkeeper pays suppliers weekly.

Warehouse manager hired internally to receive and ship stock.

Bookkeeper still handles reconciliations; accountant still provides monthly reports.

That shows how a finance team scales alongside growth.

Geoffrey (21:51)

Great example. Could you give one where the founder is less financially savvy?

Case Study 2 – Founder not strong in finance (22:14)

Same basic business: $500 k revenue, manufacturing in China, 3PL in US, Shopify only, but the founder lacks a finance background.

Tax accountant – engaged early.

Bookkeeper – hired much earlier (monthly reconciliations from the start).

Ops manager (part-time) – highly organised, pays suppliers and does inventory planning.

As revenue approaches $1 M:

Ecommerce accountant provides monthly reports.

Fractional CFO engaged sooner for cash-flow forecasting (perhaps just a few hours a month).

Geoffrey (24:24)

Nice. And you have a third case where revenue is higher but complexity is lower?

Case Study 3 – $10 M drop-shipping brand (25:51)

Business does $10 M but uses a drop-shipping model: suppliers give 30-day terms; payments from customers are immediate.

Complexity is lower; cash-flow is strong.

Finance team:

External tax accountant.

Outsourced bookkeeping, accounts payable, payroll (monthly).

Few monthly management reports; no intense cash-flow forecasting needed.

Annual tax-strategy meeting with accountant for wealth planning.

Even at $10 M, the finance team stays small because operations are simpler.

Geoffrey (28:15)

People often link team size directly to revenue, but really it’s complexity that drives it – great illustrations.

Meryl Johnston (28:56)

Yes, some founders optimise for simplicity across finance, marketing channels and ops. But with something like drop shipping, if it’s too simple, is it defensible? Are you building enough of a moat?

Geoffrey (29:23)

If you’re watching and you’re an ecommerce founder, you probably relate to at least one of these examples. I’m sure you have more questions – and so do I. Can we do a few quick-fire questions?

Meryl Johnston (29:40)

Let’s do it.

Geoffrey (29:41)

Question 1: Is there a general rule of thumb for how much a brand should spend on their finance team?

Meryl Johnston (30:02)

As a rule of thumb, expect to spend 1 % – 3 % of revenue. Complexity shifts you up or down that range. Costs can also “step up” when you hire a full-time role.

Geoffrey (30:49)

Do you think finance is a cost centre or a revenue centre?

Meryl Johnston (30:55)

If the team only reports historical data and keeps you compliant, it’s a cost centre. When they provide insights that drive pricing, margin or market decisions, they become a revenue centre.

Geoffrey (31:35)

Let’s say you’re hiring your first accountant and you’re not finance-savvy. What questions should you ask?

Meryl Johnston (32:05)

For a tax accountant:

What’s included in the engagement? Fixed fee or hourly?

Have you worked with similar ecommerce clients?

How do we communicate – email, phone, scheduled meetings? Response times?

For a management-reporting accountant:

Show examples of monthly reports for comparable clients.

How soon after month-end will I receive reports?

What ecommerce nuances (COGS, shipping, returns) do you handle?

Geoffrey (33:37)

And red flags versus green flags?

Meryl Johnston (33:57)

Red flags:

Numbers don’t pass the “gut” test – margins or sales that you know are off.

Consistently late reports – e.g. April numbers arrive in July.

Last-minute requests for compliance items – they’re being reactive, not proactive.

Green flags:

The opposite of each red flag – timely, accurate, proactive.

They explain nuances clearly and teach you what matters.

Geoffrey (35:46)

I love that first red flag – if it doesn’t look right, it probably isn’t.

Meryl Johnston (35:46)

Exactly. The first review I teach is: What am I expecting to see? If Shopify sales rose, I expect to see that in the P&L. Only after that do we analyse trends.

Geoffrey (36:49)

Meryl, you’ve provided a wealth of knowledge. Key takeaways:

Structure your finance team based on business-model complexity.

Don’t over-hire too early, but don’t under-invest either.

Mix internal ownership with trusted external partners.

Finance spend should be roughly 1 % – 3 % of revenue.

Anything to add?

Meryl Johnston (37:28)

One closing thought: reflect on your own strengths and weaknesses. Build gradually as the business scales. Don’t be afraid to change partners – it can take a couple of tries to find the right mix of outsourced and in-house talent.

Geoffrey (39:20)

Speaking of the right partners, we have an incredible accounting partner here – Bean Ninjas. If that sounds interesting, check the link below to get in touch with Meryl and her team.

Meryl, thank you again for sharing your expertise. And to everyone else, we’ll see you next time.