Altitude Sports Climbs to the Summit of Financial Efficiency

Established in 1984, Altitude Sports connects people with nature by providing durable clothing and equipment for all environments, from cityscapes to the wilderness. Headquartered in Montreal and privately owned, the company is driven by a dedicated team and majority ownership by two individuals passionate about the outdoors. Altitude Sports aims to personalize each customer journey, offering expert advice on premium gear and technical apparel.

As Canada’s leading e-commerce store for outdoor gear, Altitude Sports prides itself on creating easy, curated shopping experiences. Despite their success, the team continually strives for better efficiency and scalability. Recently, they identified specific challenges in their finance and accounting processes that were hindering faster growth.

The challenges

Data discrepancies caused by complex integrations 

Altitude Sports faced challenges in managing financial data from Shopify and NetSuite, requiring extensive customization to access transaction details related to discounts, taxes, and fulfillment. These customizations often led to discrepancies, causing treasury movements that did not match the data from Shopify. Additionally, scalability issues exacerbated the situation, resulting in prolonged month-end closing cycles.

Aggregating 1.2M orders per year consistently and with high quality

The scale of efficiently and accurately managing 1.2 Million orders per year of accounting data is challenging. With each order containing multiple transaction records, the true volume of data skyrockets to several million rows. And because the data came from multiple sources, Altitude Sports had to deal with organizing and standardizing mismatched data labels and formats. Data inconsistencies were hard to predict and constantly changed. Each month, the Altitude Sports team needed a checklist to verify data accuracy and check for edge cases that required unique accounting policies.

Jason Grenier, CFO at Altitude Sports, described:

“This inconsistency in data affected internal reporting and created significant pressure on our finance team.”

The solution

They needed a tool that could aggregate complex transaction data from multiple systems, accommodate specific accounting requirements for their business, and streamline their accounting cycles. 

In Leapfin, Altitude Sports found a solution that could be a reliable source of truth for their complex transaction data and monthly-close needs. Altitude Sports was impressed with Leapfin’s capabilities, as well as the team supporting them. Jason highlighted the decision-making process, noting, 

“It’s all about allocation of capital, opportunity costs, and where you think you can add value. We had to decide whether to build a solution internally or buy one. Leapfin is specifically focused on solving these pain points, and we quickly realized it was a better choice than trying to develop an in-house solution. Additionally Leapfin made us feel like an important client, which gave us confidence in their commitment to our success.”

Among many useful and time-saving features, Jason’s team was particularly excited about Leapfin’s accounting rules builder. Having the ability to adjust these rules and enrich their data meant Altitude Sports could accurately book different types of pricing strategies and fulfillments as actuals instead of estimates. This capability was crucial for a business handling multiple online stores with different financial treatments and logic. Jason added, 

“Managing our transaction data before Leapfin was complicated and time-consuming. Not only is the process more automated now, but the data quality has significantly improved, allowing us to better understand our revenue streams.”.

The outcomes

30% reduction in month-end close time

Fueled by consistent, high quality transaction data, Altitude Sports has seen significant efficiency improvements in their month-end close timeline and process. 

More confidence in financial data

Reduced errors and discrepancies have given Altitude Sports better insight into its data. In particular, Leapfin is automatically linking and enriching hard to find transaction details. Improving the foundational data in finance and accounting has positively impacted decisions and speed throughout the organization.

Opportunity to be stronger business partners

In addition to improved process efficiency, better overall data visibility has enabled the team to generate insights and support strategic decisions