Ask a chartered accountant

You are already past the point; the three-week close and the investor MIS request are the two classic signals.

What changes at your stage: three marketplaces means three settlement reports to reconcile every month, each with its own commission, returns, TCS under GST and TDS under section 194-O deducted by the platform. Inventory sits in your warehouse, at Amazon FBA and in transit, so gross margin cannot be known from the books alone. Input credit leaks on marketing spend, and advance tax is often paid on guesswork. A bookkeeper records what happened; none of this gets designed.

What a virtual CFO does, concretely: a month-end close in five to seven working days, a marketplace reconciliation that ties payouts to orders and flags unpaid settlements, a monthly MIS with contribution margin by channel, cash-flow forecasting for inventory purchases, the GST and 194-O credit tracking, the investor deck numbers, and the finance side of the next funding round. Usually a chartered accountant with two to five hours a week of your management time, plus a junior for the bookkeeping.

Cost: in Mumbai, ₹40,000 to ₹1 lakh a month for a ₹5 crore to ₹20 crore brand, depending on whether bookkeeping is included. That is less than a full-time finance manager and buys a more senior person for the hours you actually need.

Next step: ask two or three firms for a scoped proposal that lists the monthly deliverables and the close date, and judge them on the marketplace reconciliation first; it is the hardest part of a D2C finance function and the one most proposals skip.