What this looked like
A specialty retailer had been running the same system for more than thirty years — hundreds of thousands of sales, well over a hundred thousand customers, and no practical way to ask any of it a question. Before they had run a single transaction on bsns, interrogating their own history turned up the following.
9%
of revenue collected in a separate ledger and missing from every sales report they looked at
$1M+
of inventory sitting with customers on trial, with no follow-up list anywhere
Six figures
a year in pricing actions identified — products whose price hadn't moved in nearly a decade while costs rose by a third
The largest of those came from records that had been in the archive the whole time and had simply never been asked about. That is the part worth understanding: the value keeps coming out as the questions get better, without you doing anything else.
What we look for
Has anything stayed the same price while its cost went up?
Prices tend to move when a supplier invoice does. Anything you make or set yourself has no such trigger, and can sit untouched for years.
Are your fees and pass-throughs recovering what you think?
Card surcharges, handling fees, and delivery charges drift out of step with the costs they were meant to cover.
Is anything being shipped for less than it costs to ship?
Carrier rates change on their own schedule. Your rate table usually doesn't.
Is there revenue that never reaches your reports?
Recurring lines — rentals, service plans, deposits — are often collected in one place and reported from another.
Which customers are overdue on their own rhythm?
Not who's lapsed, but who's late by their own pattern. A regular who reorders every six months and hasn't in nine is a different problem from a one-time buyer.
How much labor does an order take now, versus five years ago?
Where hours were recorded, the trend is usually visible — and rarely flat.
What is your best sales mechanism actually worth?
Trials, consultations, quotes, demos. The step that closes the business is frequently the one nobody measures.
What we can answer depends on what your system recorded. Some keep cost history, shipping charges, and hours; many don’t. So the first step is a paid assessment of your data — so we both know what’s there before either of us commits to more.
How it works
01
A paid assessment of your data
We take your export and tell you what it can and can’t answer, before either of us commits to more. You keep the assessment either way.
02
Migration and catalog work, done together
Getting decades of records into a shape that stays useful is a knowledge problem, not a file conversion. You know why the exceptions exist; we know where they need to land.
03
Launch, with the history behind it
You go live on bsnswith your past intact — customers, catalog, and the record of what actually happened.
Implementations are paid engagements. The findings are the justification — for the customer above, the pricing actions alone were worth more than a decade of the subscription.
No decades of history?
Every month on bsnsis a month of complete record, and within a year you’ll answer questions that thirty-year archive never could. It held tens of thousands of recorded shifts and still couldn’t say what an hour cost — no wage rates, no expenses, no path to what the business actually earned.
30 days
Where the money and the time are actually going.
90 days
Real margin per product, category mix, and whether your fees and shipping are covering their costs.
One year
How often each customer really comes back, who's overdue, and where the quiet leaks are.