Your P&L surprises are born on the store floor.
Your finance team has the data. They don’t have the bandwidth to find what’s buried in it. Ward delivers the findings, with root causes attached. Click any number to see the SQL.
Vendor C billed above the active price list. The overage is recoverable.
invoice.line | 1,200 units at $4.28; contract clause 3.2(b) sets $4.12 |
|---|---|
dispute.amount | $0.16 per unit, $192 total, classified as off-contract pricing |
Gross lift looked strong. Net of cannibalisation and pull-forward it destroyed value.
promo.gross_lift | Promoted SKU +41% against its own baseline |
|---|---|
promo.net | After category cannibalisation and pull-forward, net contribution −$14K |
Ranked on GMROI and velocity together, not units alone, so profitable slow movers survive the cut.
gmroi.sku | 412 SKUs below $0.90 GMROI holding $1.8M in working capital |
|---|---|
assortment.gap | 31 SKUs selling in the urban cluster are unstocked in a demographically matched cluster |
Three stores in the ten-store cluster breach the 2% threshold on one SKU. The cause is upstream, not theft.
shrink.rate | Stores 4, 11, 19 at 2.4–3.1% against a 1.2% cluster baseline |
|---|---|
delivery.defect | All three take delivery from the same lane, defect rate 4.8% above goal |
What finance finds out
too late.
Your P&L surprises are born on the store floor.
Margin erosion only surfaces at month-end close
Inventory carrying costs are a black box
Working capital tied up in slow-moving stock nobody is watching
Same-store sales comps lack decomposition into actionable drivers
Capex decisions for store remodels lack unit-economics evidence
Source: IHL Group
Insight cards for
CFOs.
- ×Margin erosion only surfaces at month-end close
- ×Inventory carrying costs are a black box
- ×Working capital tied up in slow-moving stock nobody is watching
- ×Same-store sales comps lack decomposition into actionable drivers
- ✓GMROI tracking by category with weekly insight cards
- ✓Inventory carrying cost alerts when capital efficiency drops
- ✓Working capital optimization recommendations based on turnover trends
- ✓SSS decomposition into traffic, conversion, and basket components
GMROI tracking by category with weekly insight cards
Inventory carrying cost alerts when capital efficiency drops
Working capital optimization recommendations based on turnover trends
SSS decomposition into traffic, conversion, and basket components
Store-level unit economics cards for capex prioritization
From signature
to running insights.
A live pilot for CFOs hits these milestones on real data, on a fixed-fee schedule.
This is what Ward
delivers to you.
Dashboards
Pinned views built from saved data-lake queries.
Sources
Connect external systems to the data lake.
| Name | Type | Last sync |
|---|---|---|
sap_pos_transactions | import | 2m ago |
sap_inventory_shrinkage | import | 2m ago |
sap_labor_scheduling | import | 14m ago |
retail_inventory_weekly | import | 1h ago |
retail_google_ads_daily | import | 1h ago |
retail_meta_ads_daily | import | 1h ago |
retail_ga4_website_daily | import | 1h ago |
Policies
Browse and manage Cedar access policies for your tenant.
| Policy ID | Effect | Resources |
|---|---|---|
merch-read-default | permit | Model::* |
finance-read-shrinkage | permit | Model::"inventory_shrinkage" |
vendor-blocked | forbid | Model::"labor_*" |
region-west-only | permit | Tenant::"acme" |
GMROI dropped from $3.10 to $2.65 in frozen foods this quarter. Cause: 3 new SKUs added in Q2 are turning at 40% below category average. Recommend rationalization review.
Read-only credentials, Cedar policy per agent, a full reasoning trail on every number. Your security review is short and your data team is not carrying the risk.
Read the security posture →The blind spots that cost
CFOs the most.
KPIs that erode quietly when nobody’s watching, one from each vertical this role covers.
What Ward covers
for CFOs.
Retail verticals
Insight typesThe first three are where this role usually starts.
Metrics Ward moves
Platform pieces this role leans on
Systems Ward connects toRead-only by default.
Operator stories
and the alternatives.
Two ways to start.
Run a fixed-fee pilot on your data, or talk to advisory about a broader engagement.
Playbooks for Finance.
The playbooks this team runs on Ward.
Control AI spend by department and user.
Without skimping on the outcome.
Give every department and every user a compute budget. Ward routes each question to the cheapest model that clears the quality bar, so finance caps the spend without capping what the business gets back.
Your P&L surprises are born on the store floor.
See what Ward finds for Finance leaders, with root causes and recommended actions.
Read-only to start · your LLM keys · SOC 2 Type II underway · or book a call directly
Find out what your data has been hiding.
Tell us about your operation. We’ll show you the problems Ward catches, and the ones your current tools miss.