How Impact Purchasing replaced five spreadsheets with one back office

Each part of the business lived in its own spreadsheet: seller applications, nonprofit verification, fee tiers, donation allocations and payouts, plus Stripe exports and a shared support inbox. The team spent its evenings reconciling them, and a nonprofit asking what it had received, and from which purchases, waited days for an answer.

Closing each month’s nonprofit payouts took three weeks of matching orders to donations by hand, and the founder couldn’t see which sellers and causes were driving giving until the month was over. Off-the-shelf marketplace tools had been tried: priced per seat or as a cut of sales, built for stores that don’t give anything away, and none of them could follow a donation from checkout to payout.

We spent the first two weeks with the operations team, sitting in on seller approvals, nonprofit checks and a month-end payout, and mapped every column of every spreadsheet so nothing they relied on would be lost.

The ledger came first. Every purchase now records its donation and the buyer’s chosen nonprofit at checkout, so payouts add themselves up instead of being rebuilt each month. The team gets every seller, nonprofit and payout on one screen, on the Stripe account they already had. Two months of payouts ran beside the spreadsheets before the team switched over.

By month two the spreadsheets were gone and the team had its evenings back: twelve hours a week each. Payouts close in two days, and nonprofits see their own totals and reports, so the “what did we receive?” emails stopped.

The founder now sees giving by seller and cause while the month is running, not after it. When Impact Purchasing opened enrollment to every seller, new sellers were approved on the day they applied, with no one added to the team.