The Amazon data problem
An Amazon FBA brand at £3m of annual revenue produces something in the order of sixteen distinct data sources that need to be reconciled to produce a true P&L: the settlement report, FBA fee preview, FBA storage fees, long-term storage fees, removal and disposal fees, inbound transport, returns, refund administration, advertising, brand registry, vendor central if applicable, and the marketplace-collected VAT lines, repeated across every marketplace. No native dashboard reconciles them. The first job of a CFO is to build the reconciliation.
SKU-level decisions, not catalogue-level averages
Most Amazon brands manage at the catalogue level because that is what the platform shows them. SKU-level decisions require allocating every fee, every return, and every PPC pound to its ASIN. Once that is done, the typical catalogue splits into three roughly equal tiers: ASINs that print money, ASINs that break even, and ASINs that are quietly losing money. The middle and bottom tiers are usually funded by the top tier, often without the founder realising. The decision to cull, reprice, or re-position the bottom tier is one of the highest-ROI decisions a CFO can take an Amazon brand through.
Ad spend tied to profit, not vanity metrics
The default metric most sellers watch tells you what you spent to make a sale, but not whether that sale actually made money. The same ad cost can be profitable on a high-margin product and loss-making on a thin-margin one. The CFO version of the ad review is one view per product, with the real profit each pound of ad spend brings in as the only number that matters.