Focal Software, Inc

10/16/2026

Most margin reporting stops at the product.

Because Focal costs actual units rather than averages, and builds a finished good's cost from its bill of materials, margin reads by channel, by product, by SKU, and down to the components, labor and overhead inside the build.

Profit and loss by marketplace, fees by channel, channel contribution and COGS by SKU all come from the same records, not from a monthly reconstruction.

Knowing a product's margin is useful. Knowing which component moved it is what changes a decision.

https://getfocalsoft.com/

10/14/2026

A marketplace payout arrives as one net number, and it usually gets handled the same way: post a summary journal, match the deposit in the bank feed, move on.

The order-level detail stays outside the books, which is exactly where it is needed. Any question about a channel, a product or a promotion then gets answered from a spreadsheet, if it can be answered at all.

Focal reconciles settlements by channel and reconciles channel sales order by order against the storefront. The payout ties back to the orders, fees and refunds inside it, and forward to the deposit that cleared it.

The question is not whether the books balance. It is whether the detail behind the balance is still there.

With it intact, a question about one channel, one product or one promotion takes minutes to answer instead of a day of exports.

10/13/2026

Do you know the actual cost of the inventory you sell?

When supplier prices change or freight costs increase, using average inventory costs can make it harder to understand your true product margins.

For growing eCommerce businesses, every cost matters!

Focal Software helps bring the full picture together, from landed costs and production expenses to FIFO inventory costing, so you can better understand your COGS and product profitability.

Because your business deserves more than estimates. It deserves a clearer view of the numbers behind every sale. 📊

Actual cost, not average.

Discover why it matters in our latest newsletter!

👉 Read it here: https://mailchi.mp/getfocalsoft.com/marketplace-vs-dtc-which-model-makes-you-more-money-17559668

Most systems cost inventory with a weighted average. Every unit of a SKU carries the same blended cost, so a freight spike or a supplier increase spreads across units that never saw it. Other setups use a standard cost typed in once and revisited rarely. Both are estimates, and every margin figure d...

10/12/2026

Three-way matching is basic accounting practice: the purchase order, the goods receipt and the bill have to agree before anything gets paid.

With an accounting tool and spreadsheets, that check is a person with two browser tabs and a good memory.

In Focal, bills match to purchase orders and goods receipts, several receipts can link to one bill, and any price difference is recorded with a reason. Bank transactions then match to bills, purchase orders, receipts and sales orders.

The chain from the purchase order to the money leaving the bank stays connected, so the exceptions are the only thing anyone needs to look at.

https://getfocalsoft.com/

10/09/2026

There is a name for what most systems do with cost: weighted average.

Every unit of a SKU carries the same blended cost, so a freight spike or a supplier increase spreads across units that never saw it. Other setups use a standard cost typed in once and revisited rarely.

Focal uses actual costing. First in, first out cost layers. Landed cost built from the purchase order plus freight, duties, insurance and fees. Multi-level bills of materials that roll component cost into the finished good, with labor and overhead from the build.

The unit that sold carries the cost that unit actually incurred, so its margin is a number to act on rather than an estimate t

https://getfocalsoft.com/

10/07/2026

Focal gets called an ERP sometimes. It is worth being precise about why it is not.

An ERP is a system a business gets installed into. It can do nearly anything, once a consulting team has spent months configuring it, and much of that capability was designed for manufacturers and distributors rather than for brands selling across channels.

A point tool is the opposite. It does one job well, assumes something else owns the rest, and leaves the seams between systems to a person.

A financial operating system is a third thing. It connects to the sales channels, the bank and the bill system. It runs the operations directly: inventory, purchase orders, goods receipts, bills of materials, production and cost. The financials come out of that work rather than being assembled separately afterward.

One record carries the order, the cost, the payout and the entry.

For the person who has to produce the numbers, that is the difference between a month spent assembling them and a morning spent using them.

https://getfocalsoft.com/

10/05/2026

Focal exists because of a few hundred conversations.

The team talked with hundreds of brands: controllers, ops leads, finance managers and founders. The same two complaints came up in nearly every one.

ERPs are powerful and take months, a consulting team and a budget to stand up. Point tools are easy to buy and leave gaps between each other that someone has to cover by hand.

So Focal took what ERPs get right, one connected system with real inventory, purchasing and costing, and what point tools get right, quick setup and software people will actually use, and left the rest behind.

Many of those operators shaped how it works.

https://getfocalsoft.com/

10/02/2026

There is a well-funded bet that models can do the financial work. Gather, reconcile, infer.

The problem is the audience. No CPA, lender, or diligence team wants a probabilistic cost of goods sold or an inferred journal entry. They want the number provably correct and traceable to the event that produced it.

Focal's transformation is deterministic. A stock movement is a defined ledger entry, always, not a value a model estimated.
For an accounting system, that is the feature, not a limitation. Forecasting is predictive and lives in its own layer, which is where prediction belongs.

https://getfocalsoft.com/

10/02/2026

Most multi-channel brands run the same setup.

A storefront. A marketplace or two. An inventory app. Bill.com for bills and expenses. A spreadsheet for product cost. Another for cash planning. Then QuickBooks at the end, receiving summary journals through a connector.

The connector is the part worth looking at. It sits between the systems that run the business and the system that records it, translating one into the other. Whatever it cannot translate gets summarized, and whatever gets summarized stops being answerable.

Focal is built without that middle. It connects to the same channels, banks and bill systems, and from there the operations and the accounting are one system, on the same records.

For the person who has to produce the numbers, that is the difference between assembling them every month and reading them.

https://getfocalsoft.com/

09/30/2026

The obvious fix for fragmented financial data is better reporting. A warehouse, a cleaner dashboard, everything finally visible in one place.

It is the wrong fix, and the reason is in the design of the pattern itself.

Extract, Transform, Load assumes a person reads the output and then goes and does something in a different system. The pipeline's obligation ends at presentation.

That is correct for reporting on a business. For running one, it means the data sits dead at the exact moment it becomes useful.

https://getfocalsoft.com/