Consumer Package Goods (CPG) Accounting Services

We specialize in resolving industry-specific challenges such as trade spend optimization, SKU profitability analysis, inventory management, and compliance with industry regulations, ensuring that your accounting aligns with your business goals.

EA’s outsourced bookkeepers ensure smooth communication and collaboration with onshore teams across different time zones in the following ways:

• EA  teams follow US Eastern Time and work from 8am to 5pm EST.
• Schedules meetings: We ensure regular MS Teams or Zoom sessions at mutually convenient times to ensure consistent communication.
• We use MS Teams/Google/Slack chat for asynchronous communication for ongoing discussions, allowing both parties to respond at their convenience.
• Meeting recaps: After each meeting we send detailed summaries via email to keep everyone aligned and informed.

Here are some reasons why inventory accounting is uniquely challenging for CPG brands:

1. Inventory valuation affects COGs and margins on the CPG company’s P&L, which is why it must be accurate.
2. Raw materials change price constantly. Commodity inputs like corn, cocoa, or aluminum fluctuate with global markets. So the cost you planned for a unit of product and what it actually costs to make are rarely the same and that gap has to be tracked meticulously every single month.
3. Most businesses don’t have to worry about their stock going bad. But CPG inventory has a short life and it can expire. When products get too close to their expiry date, their value has to be written down (sometimes to zero). Managing that proactively is a constant discipline.
4. Your inventory lives in many places at once. At any given moment, you have raw materials at a supplier, ingredients being processed at a factory, finished goods in a warehouse, product in a truck, and potentially goods sitting at 3PL. Each of those locations has a different accounting treatment, and you need a clear picture of all of it simultaneously.
5. Seasonal and promotional inventory adds another layer. When you build up stock for the holiday season or run a “buy 2 get 1 free” promotion, the accounting treatment of those extra units is nuanced. The free unit still has a cost it just has no revenue attached to it, and that has to be properly captured so your margins tell the true story.
6. Every SKU needs its own cost, built from scratch. Every size, flavor, and format you sell has a unique bill of materials with its own ingredients, packaging, labor, and overhead allocation. When you discontinue one, any packaging made exclusively for it is typically worthless and needs to be written off immediately.

Each month our teams prepare a complete financial package that will include your P&L, balance sheet, cash flow statement, and a full breakdown of every balance, all backed by the supporting documents like vendor invoices and everything else.

At year-end, we finalize the books so your tax consultants receive up-to-date, organized accounts they can work from immediately without chasing missing invoices or waiting on reconciliations.