How The Best CPG Brands Connect Their Ops and Finance Departments
Most founders run finance and operations in silos. Operations pushes product onto shelves and keeps retailers happy. Finance guards cash and margin. They push and pull on each other, and although they are trading data back and forth, they are disconnected in terms of system and strategy.
I sat down with Anthony Domenici, a CFA and owner of BASECAMP Consulting. They run finance for growth-stage CPG brands. We dug into what changes from brands when ops and finance actually work together, and one thing he said reframed the whole conversation for me. CPG finance isn't bookkeeping. If your finance function only records what already happened (historicals), you've built an expensive rear-view mirror. The reason to connect finance and operations is to predict the outcome of every move before you actually make it.
He calls that connection a financial operating system. A $2B company runs it as a formal sales and operations planning (S&OP) process with its own department and headcount. A brand doing $1-20M runs a smaller, scrappier version: a founder, a couple of internal people, and some outside service providers all working under the same process and towards the same goals.
Give finance a seat before the decision
Early on, when a team is new and still figuring out how it works together, a weekly touch base does more than any dashboard. Operations is usually running demand planning, buying inventory, fulfilling wholesale POs, and managing the co-packer. Finance needs a live view of all of it, because cash flow timing, AR timing, and financing decisions ride on top of those movements. Can we fulfill this PO, do we need to put a deposit down, do we finance it? You can't answer any of that if finance hears about the order after it ships.
Margin lives in these details too. When you rush raw materials to hit a date, you quietly hand back a few points of margin. Tariffs and taxes have done real damage to brands this year. Anthony's point is that you want to understand how work and money flow through the company, who owns what, and where the handoffs are, so the right person sees the right number in time to act.
A cadence you can keep
The plumbing underneath all of this is ordinary and unglamorous. You need clean invoicing, which drives accurate AR, and deductions sit inside that. Anthony likes to stand up a deductions accrual quickly, based on what's actually been agreed to, so the cash forecast reflects reality instead of hope. Sales and marketing feed this too. Run a promotion and expect a sales peak, and operations needs to know so the inventory is there while finance watches whether the spend or a financed PO is about to pull cash down.
Then there's the weekly cash flow snapshot, which pulls together payroll, credit card bills, the big chunky expenses, and the inventory deposits coming down the road. A lot of founders pay bills at random, whenever a vendor bugs them, living inside their inbox. Replacing that with a real AP process, with approvals and agreed terms, sounds boring and pays off immediately. The same discipline applies to how you code transactions. When finance asks what a charge was for, "just Google the vendor" misses the point, because a charge to Amazon could be ten different things. What finance needs is the intent behind the spend.
Not all demand is worth capturing
Here's the part founders resist. You want to capture every sale, and you can't, and chasing all of it will bleed you. Anthony described opportunity as the death of a thousand cuts. There's more demand than you can fund, and the wrong slice of it ties up cash and attention you needed elsewhere.
So the tension between operations and finance earns its keep. Everyone agrees on the hero SKUs, the ones you never let go out of stock, and those get first claim on resources. After that you look at where velocity is best and where margin is best, and you accept that those are often different channels and different products. A shelf being available doesn't mean your product belongs on it. The best economics and the right fit for the brand don't always point the same way, and you only make that call well with operations, finance, and sometimes marketing in the room together.
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Forecasting is a muscle you build
Anthony has a line I'll steal → There are only two kinds of forecasts, lucky and wrong. Nobody knows exactly what's coming, so the value isn't in the prediction, it's in the loop. You plan, you measure what happened, you look at the delta, and you decide whether it's a real change or just noise. Then you run it again.
This is circular by design, and it's uncomfortable at first because it makes accuracy visible and holds people to it. Egos get bruised. That's the process working. Run it quarterly, expect the first few cycles to be rough, and treat it as a skill the team builds rather than a plan you lock down once.
Know your graduation moment
On day one, the bar is low and non-negotiable. Open a business entity, open a bank account, keep a real set of books, and don't co-mingle personal and business money. Untangling that later costs far more than doing it right now. Bring in a bookkeeper early so your time goes somewhere better.
The inflection point tends to show up between $500K and $1M in annual revenue, or once monthly revenue climbs toward $50K to $100K. More moving parts, more channels, thinner resources, and now you need real answers about channel performance. Retail launches accelerate it, because chargebacks and deductions arrive with volume and they're brutal to track by hand. The math changes as you scale: a COGS swing of one point is nothing on a thousand units and very real across hundreds of thousands.
If you take one thing from all of this, make it an inventory management system. That was Anthony's single piece of advice, and it matches what I've seen play out repeatedly. A real system gets you out of spreadsheets and gives you perpetual inventory, COGS over time, and enough visibility that everyone works off the same source of truth. It tells you when your scale has earned a price break and when you're about to stock out on your number one SKU, which is the mistake growth punishes hardest. Sales data syncs in, and the tool becomes the one place finance and operations actually meet. For food and beverage brands, Anthony usually points people to Cin7. There's a level where spreadsheets are fine, and a level where they quietly hold you back. Most founders cross it later than they should.
Bravo CPG: Bravo CPG is an embedded operations team for growth-stage food, beverage, beauty, and wellness brands. We combine hands-on execution with senior-level ownership, taking full responsibility for production, co-man and 3PL management, demand planning, wholesale orders, freight, and more. A lot of what Anthony described, the weekly cadence, the clean AP process, the inventory system that finally gives everyone one set of numbers, is the connective tissue we build and run inside brands every day. Our goal is simple: help you scale profitably without operational chaos.
BASECAMP Consulting Group: Since 2020, BASECAMP Consulting Group has earned the trust of 150+ founder-led brands by bringing a Founder’s Mindset to accounting and finance. Our team combines deep accounting and finance experience with specialized CPG expertise. We start by building a strong accounting foundation, then create cash flow clarity, stronger reporting, and the financial discipline needed to scale and build enterprise value. We understand the grind because we work alongside founders every day. BASECAMP Consulting Group is culture-first, community-minded, and focused on helping brands grow with greater clarity, control, and confidence.
