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

When Pioneer's president and 35 year controller both left, every replacement path ran expensive. Here's how Fiskal migrated them off SAP onto Cin7 and now runs the whole finance function as part of the team.

CASE STUDIES

How Fiskal helped Pioneer Family Brands replace a 35-year finance team, trust an outsourced partner, and scale with confidence.

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

How Fiskal helped Ghurka regain financial clarity, rebuild trust in their numbers, and scale with confidence.

"We didn't just need an accountant. We needed a partner who could make the whole system work."

Company

Pioneer Family Brands, Inc.,
founded in 1983

Location

Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

Industry

Food and beverage, flavor manufacturing

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.

About Pioneer Family Brands

“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.

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.

The Challenge

“All the outsource companies that I talked to kept saying, you need to possibly look at doing something different.”
-Donald Griffiths

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.

The Turning Point

“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

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.

What Fiskal Did

No more duplicate entry across systems
Full visibility into landed cost and true COGS
Seamless migration to Xero with zero disruption
Real-time, reliable monthly reporting
Operational clarity, and headspace to grow

The Results

“Fiskal doesn’t just respond. They anticipate. They solve problems before we even think of them.”

What started as a simple search for an accountant turned into something far more valuable: a partnership.

Looking Ahead

“It all feels like one team now. Accounting, systems, reporting, it just works.”

Ghurka isn’t just caught up. They’re building forward. And they’re doing it with confidence, clarity, and a partner that actually understands how the whole business fits together.