“This is the first time in my business that I look at the numbers and I know that the numbers are real.”

Play Pits went from spreadsheets and a warehouse fire to numbers its founder actually trusts. See how Fiskal rebuilt the inventory and accounting stack on Cin7 and Xero, ahead of a 1000 store CVS launch.

CASE STUDIES

How Fiskal helped Play Pits replace spreadsheets with a trustworthy Cin7 and Xero stack, and scale into retail with confidence.

“This is the first time in my business that I look at the numbers and I know that the numbers are real.”

Company

Play Pits,
founded 2018

Location

Atlanta, Georgia, US

Industry

Consumer packaged goods, natural personal care for kids

Play Pits makes natural deodorant for kids. It started, in the founder’s own words, not as a business but as a recipe in a kitchen, after her six year old son climbed into her car after football practice smelling, as she puts it, like a grown man.

About Play Pits

"Short answer is Play Pits is an all natural deodorant for smelly kids... I went looking for something that was safe and effective and that spoke to him on the shelf and nothing did that. And so I got in the kitchen and I made him something and he loved it so much. That’s how Play Pits was created."
— Chantel Powell, Founder and CEO of Play Pits

Founded in 2018, the business grew from that home kitchen into a warehouse, survived a fire that destroyed the warehouse and everything in it, and now runs through a contract cold packing partner and a 3PL. Today it sells direct to consumer through playpits.com, wholesale through Faire and local shops, and retail through Target, Amazon, and an upcoming CVS launch.

In the early years there was no operation to speak of. Ingredients were bought from Amazon, costing was simple mental math, and tracking lived in spreadsheets that were updated monthly but never quite complete. Two events exposed how fragile that setup was: the warehouse fire, which forced a full accounting of the loss, and the move into retail, which demanded a different level of accounting altogether.

What was breaking:

No sophisticated inventory system until the fire forced the issue, with accuracy sitting around 60% to 70% and a lot of manual guessing
Regular surprise dead stock, mismatched case pack counts, and untracked lot numbers that turned into painful write-offs
Month-end inventory reconciliation that took 3 to 4 weeks of untangling Shopify sales, retail PO receipts, and warehouse count sheets
15 to 20+ hours a week lost to manual landed cost calculations and cross-channel inventory updates
An accountant who did not know Cin7, creating a learning curve and the burden of training another person

The Challenge

“A lot of spreadsheets, lot of spreadsheets that were updated monthly, but we forgot this part over here.”
- Chantel Powell, Founder and CEO

Play Pits had already chosen Cin7 over other options, including Fishbowl, for its functionality and its interface. But an early onboarding arrangement through a connection did not work out, and that ran for around six months. The realisation that mattered was this: the business did not just need the tool, it needed someone who understood the tool and the numbers together. Play Pits found Fiskal through the Startup CPG community.

The Turning Point

“We kissed a lot of frogs... It was helpful to have somebody that understood Cin7 and really could service like the expert on the integration of it versus us being dependent upon to know how to do it.”
- Chantel Powell, Founder and CEO

Trust was the other half of the decision. Burned by previous partners and deep in decision fatigue, Chantel still trusted Fiskal with two significant moves in a short window: staying on Cin7, then migrating accounting from QuickBooks Online to Xero.

“The communication and the trust was established very early on in the relationship... it’s almost like, OK, they really want us to be great. So let us trust them with this decision.”
- Chantel Powell, Founder and CEO

Fiskal stepped in as the financial operations partner across both the inventory system and the books, then put a weekly rhythm in place. Specifically:

Took on Cin7 as the expert partner, rather than leaving Play Pits dependent on internal knowledge of the system
Recommended Xero when asked, while making clear the final call was the client’s, then migrated the accounting from QuickBooks Online to Xero
Handled the migration so the transition was smooth, with the client only needing to manage sign in, access, and permissions
Set up reporting the client could actually use: weekly cash flow, receivable statements, management accounts, and a dashboard
Established a weekly operating cadence, Monday reporting and notifications, a Tuesday touch point with the team, email follow ups through the week
Built cash flow models connecting inventory lead times with real-time sales and Xero data, used to plan cash burn against retail payment terms ahead of nationwide production runs
Added a dedicated Fiskal team member and helped implement an MRP system to move stockout and overstock management from reactive firefighting toward predictive planning

What Fiskal Did

“You all did a great job with like just moving everything over. I probably had to do a few things with like signing in and access and permissions, but it was a very smooth process and I’m actually happy with it.”
- Chantel Powell, Founder and CEO

The payoff the client names first is clarity, the confidence that the numbers in front of her are real.

The Results

“This is the first time in my business that I look at the numbers and I know that the numbers are real.”
- Chantel Powell, Founder and CEO

With harder numbers behind that clarity:

Inventory accuracy moved from an estimated 60% to 70% under manual tracking to a reliable single source of truth in Cin7
Dead stock and write-off surprises, once a regular occurrence, are now essentially a non-issue
Month-end inventory reconciliation dropped from 3 to 4 weeks down to a few business days
Inventory and costing work fell from 15 to 20+ hours a week to 2 to 3 hours, freeing up more than 15 hours a week for the business itself
Order fulfillment now runs at a 98%+ OTIF (on-time in-full) rate
Operational errors, such as misaligned SKUs and pricing mismatches, are down an estimated 60%
Checking real-time cash position and stock levels now takes seconds on a phone, instead of the three to four days it used to take calling the warehouse for manual count sheets
Onboarding a new retailer’s internal systems setup now runs 3 to 4 weeks faster than before

“Now it’s down to maybe 2 or 3 hours of quick reviews and approvals. That frees up over 15 hours a week for us to actually focus on growing the brand instead of getting buried in busywork.”
- Chantel Powell, Founder and CEO

Retail puts a CPG founder in a hard cash position: produce months in advance, ship, then wait six months or more to be paid. The difference between launching in Target without trustworthy numbers and launching in CVS with them showed up, in the client’s words, as a mental health difference.

Peace of Mind

“My launch in Target compared to my launch in CVS, from a mental health standpoint, I’m so much better... now I’m sleeping at night. I see the numbers. I know they’re there.”
- Chantel Powell, Founder and CEO

The operational side tells the same story. The Target launch was trial by fire, without Cin7 in place, meaning heavy manual oversight, late-night firefighting, and learning retail compliance the hard way. By the time CVS came around, the Cin7 data rules, 3PL protocols, and Fiskal financial workflows were already built out, so the only real learning curve left was the new retailer’s own terms and portals.

Play Pits launched into 1000 CVS stores nationwide on March 20, alongside a new product line of deodorizing wipes for kids. From here, the plan is to expand beyond deodorant and wipes into a full personal care line, grow direct to consumer, and keep scaling retail doors across the country, all built on the Cin7, Xero, and Fiskal foundation already in place.

Looking Ahead

“With Cin7, Xero, and Fiskal holding down our backend, we’re built to scale 5x without breaking a sweat.”
- Chantel Powell, Founder and CEO

From a recipe in a kitchen to a national retail rollout, Play Pits now runs on numbers it can trust, and a partner built in for the next stage of growth.