How Fiskal moved Pioneer Family Brands from SAP Business One to Cin7 and an outsourced finance team

"I can't even imagine us trying to do it without you guys."

• Company: Pioneer Family Brands, Inc., founded in 1983
• Location: Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
• Industry: Food and beverage, flavor manufacturing

About Pioneer Family Brands

Pioneer Family Brands is a flavor manufacturer. Its brand, Tropical Sno, is the shaved ice product most people first meet on a trip to Hawaii. Owner Donald Griffiths grew up in the business. His father started it while Donald was in high school, and Donald worked alongside him for years before buying the company in 2007.

Before that, Donald had built and run his own company, Freezing Point, maker of a frozen convenience-store beverage called Frazzle. He grew it to roughly 8,000 locations and sold it in 2020. The thread running through both businesses is a single philosophy.

"We're not worried about trying to make it cheap, but we're worried first about making it taste good because we know if it tastes good, then the customer is going to come back."

— Donald Griffiths

Pioneer licenses the Tropical Sno brand to small operators, many of them families running their first business. The model gives those operators a proven product and the freedom to run things their own way. As Donald puts it, Tropical Sno can be whatever the owner wants it to be, from a weekend stand to a full-time living across several locations.

The Challenge

Pioneer ran on SAP Business One for around twenty years. It worked. Donald could track 40 different flavors, each with its own bill of materials, and get the data he needed. The problem was not the software failing. It was what happened when the people who ran it left.

Donald's president and his controller departed at almost the same time. The controller had been with him for more than 35 years. That left him at a crossroads, and every path looked expensive.

• Replacing the team meant hiring people who knew both accounting and SAP, which proved hard to find.
• Outsourcing the finance function while staying on SAP meant the outsourcing firms had to hire SAP specialists too, pushing the cost back up.
• Even when it worked, SAP left Donald running and reading the reports himself.

"All the outsource companies that I talked to kept saying, you need to possibly look at doing something different."

— Donald Griffiths

The Turning Point

The outsourcing conversations opened Donald's eyes to a set of modern operational stacks he had not known existed. He did what he always does. He made a list and started demoing. He did not want a step backwards into spreadsheets and QuickBooks. He wanted something that could still carry the manufacturing side, bills of material, inventory, averaged costs, done automatically.

Cin7 cleared that bar. But the deciding factor was the team standing behind it. Fiskal came highly recommended through Cin7, and a face-to-face meeting with Pierre sealed it.

"We gained confidence when you traveled out and met with me in person."

— Donald Griffiths

It was still a leap. Donald had handed his entire finance function to an outsourced team based in South Africa, people he had not previously known. His instinct told him it was right, and acting on that instinct is something he has learned to trust.

"If my gut feels like it's the right thing to do, just do it and do it immediately and don't drag my feet."

— Donald Griffiths

What Fiskal Did

This was not a single software swap. It was a full business transformation, replacing one branded ERP with a connected operational stack and an outsourced financial operations team to run it.

• Migrated Pioneer off SAP Business One onto Cin7, chosen for the strength of its manufacturing capability, the bills of material, inventory tracking and averaged costing Donald needed.
• Built out the surrounding stack: Xero for accounting, Ramp, Gusto for payroll, and the WooCommerce storefront, with Avalara for tax calculation.
• Took on the finance function end to end, from bookkeeper level through to controller level, run as an embedded part of the team rather than a detached vendor.
• Resolved the tax sync between WooCommerce, Cin7 and Avalara so calculations came out correct, working within how each system talks to the others.
• Delivered a clean go-live timed to the start of Pioneer's new fiscal year, starting from a fresh slate rather than importing SAP history.
• Produces a summarized monthly report for Donald, and is building additional KPIs to track and report each month.

The Results

The shift moved Donald from running his own reports to receiving them, summarized and ready to read.

• Monthly reporting now arrives prepared and summarized, where SAP had required Donald to pull it himself.
• Custom KPIs are being built and tracked on a monthly basis, with more value expected as transaction history accumulates.
• The go-live landed on plan at the new fiscal year, with only minor glitches and nothing that stopped operations.
• The manufacturing side that mattered most, bills of material and inventory, is handled inside Cin7 as intended.

"Everything's, for the most part, worked pretty good. There's been a few glitches, but nothing that's like a game changer or shut anything down."

— Donald Griffiths

Looking Ahead

Pioneer is not chasing explosive growth. It grows a little each year, signing up more families who want a business of their own. Meanwhile Donald, Porter and Cooper have started a second company, DoPoCo (depoco.com), selling flavors to the coffee and dirty soda markets. The plan is to bring it onto Cin7 and the same stack once it has a few more months of growth behind it.

"I can't even imagine us trying to do it without you guys. I think the task would have been daunting."

— Donald Griffiths

The Bigger Picture

For Donald, the decision to outsource came down to a principle he has built his career on: work on the business, not just in it. Handing the accounting to a team he trusts let him do exactly that, focusing on what he is good at and letting others own what they are good at.

"I don't need to be an expert in everything, but I just need to find the people that can help me that are experts."

— Donald Griffiths

From one branded ERP to a connected stack and a finance team that runs it, Pioneer kept the manufacturing strength it relied on and handed off the rest. The same playbook is already lined up for the next venture.