TrainerRoad · 2025–Present
TrainerRoad Accounting Hub
Internal tool that automates Apple revenue reconciliation, sales tax tracking, and QuickBooks analysis. Replaced hours of spreadsheet work with automated journal entries and outlier detection.
Challenge
Finance at TrainerRoad involved too much manual work. Apple doesn't clearly show merchant fees. You have to derive them from two different reports and do Excel wizardry to get a journal entry. Sales tax remittance varies by state (monthly, quarterly, annually), and a different team handles payments, so reconciling those transactions at month end was tedious. And our QuickBooks data was hard to analyze without pulling it into spreadsheets.
Approach
Built an internal hub with three tools. Apple Journal Entry Reconciliation lets you upload Apple's reports, calculates the merchant fees automatically, and pushes a journal entry straight to QuickBooks. Sales Tax Tracker automatically creates a QuickBooks expense when a sales tax payment is made, so when the transaction hits the bank it pairs immediately with the right info. QuickBooks Analysis feeds our P&L and all transactions into a dashboard that tracks expenses over time, flags outliers in spend (positive or negative), and surfaces potential misclassifications.
Impact
Hours of monthly spreadsheet work replaced with uploads and dashboards. The accounting team spends time on analysis instead of data entry.
Reflection
The best internal tools are the ones that eliminate the work nobody wanted to do in the first place. Nobody misses the spreadsheets.