$60K-a-month in pie drops, with margin visible per drop.

The setup¶

A specialty pie business running drops through Hot Plate. Customers pre-order one month, the owner sources ingredients and bakes, and the pies drop the following month. Each drop is its own release — flavors come and go, some return, some don't. Hot Plate takes its cut, processing fees come out of each transaction, and the rest deposits to her bank.

What was broken¶

Hot Plate doesn't sync to Xero or QuickBooks. Like most vertical platforms, there's no native connector — every transaction has to be exported and decomposed manually.

So the books showed deposits, not drops. Cash from a pre-order landed one month; the pies actually shipped the next. On cash-basis books, revenue spiked when customers bought and disappeared the month she actually fulfilled. Monthly P&L was nonsense — some months looked great, others looked broken, and neither matched what was really happening.

Worse, she couldn't see margin per drop. Some flavors were almost certainly losing money — high ingredient cost, slow to bake, expensive to ship — but the books blended every drop into a single monthly number. When she thought about bringing a flavor back, she had no data to decide on.

What we built¶

A monthly CSV process: pull the Hot Plate transaction report, decompose each transaction into gross sales, platform fee, processing fee, shipping, and refunds. Tag every transaction by drop. Track deferred revenue outside the platform — cash gets recognized as revenue when the pies ship, not when the customer pays. Allocate ingredient and packaging costs to the drop they were used for. Load it into the books with each drop as its own segment.

How it runs now¶

Every month: pull the export, decompose by drop, recognize revenue against actual fulfillment, allocate costs. The books reflect the business — pre-orders sit as deferred revenue until shipped, then move to the P&L in the right month. The owner can pull a margin-per-drop report any time, and decide which flavors to bring back based on what actually made money.

The outcome¶

• Revenue recognized when pies ship, not when customers pay — monthly P&L finally reflects the actual business.
• Platform, processing, and shipping fees broken out as expenses, so margin is visible.
• Margin per drop visible for the first time — flavor decisions backed by real numbers.
• Two flavors retired after the books showed they were break-even at best.
• Books reconcile to Hot Plate's reports, every month.