Rebuilding the finance function of a 30-year family-owned European e-commerce business

Habys is a Polish family-owned brand serving physiotherapists, massage therapists, and beauty professionals across Europe — massage and rehabilitation tables, cosmetic beds, accessories. On the market since 1998, operating through a strong e-commerce channel, with a German entity alongside the Polish one. The leadership team runs the business with a sharp eye on what's working: which SKUs are profitable, which channels are pulling weight, where margin lives, where it leaks.

The problem wasn't that finance was broken. It was that the chart of accounts the company had been using for years couldn't answer those questions cleanly. Margin per SKU lived in a head and in a spreadsheet. PL and DE consolidation needed manual work each time. Bookings didn't map to how the leadership thought about the business.

It's a pattern we see across family-owned businesses that have grown into multi-country structures: the finance function was built for the company at 10M EUR and quietly carried it to 50M without ever being redesigned. The foundation isn't broken — it just isn't designed for the shape of the business it's now supporting. That's the work we were asked to do.

• Chart of accounts not built for an e-commerce business at this scale
• Margin per SKU and per channel — the leadership team's most important questions — didn't come out of the books cleanly
• PL and DE operations needing consolidation, with the process requiring manual reconciliation each time
• Plans for CFO Studio deployment after the foundation was rebuilt, but only viable if the chart of accounts could feed it
• An external accounting partner and an internal IT team that needed to be aligned with the new structure
• Periodic statutory audit on the calendar — the rebuild had to land cleanly with the auditor

Stage 1 — Redesigning the foundation

‍First job: rebuild the foundation. We ran workshops with the Habys team, took the existing chart of accounts apart, and designed a new one mapped to how the business actually works — margin per product group and product type, margin per channel, PL/DE consolidation built in at the structural level rather than bolted on after the fact. Then we documented every booking procedure so the external accounting partner, the external accounting software implementation team, and the internal IT team could implement the changes consistently. We stayed close during implementation: joining calls, reviewing the first bookings under the new structure, troubleshooting where reality met the design. Because the company is subject to periodic statutory audit, we also worked with the team in their discussions with the auditor to ensure a smooth transition.

Stage 2 — Building the controlling layer

‍With the chart of accounts in place, we moved into the controlling layer. The annual budget got revised to align with the new structure. Then came the Power BI work — while the team built the commercial side of the project on their own, we developed the financial side from scratch, in line with industry best practices. Multiple dashboard views, each one designed around how the leadership team actually runs the business: margin per product group and channel, unit economics, PL/DE consolidated profitability, and the metrics that matter to a multi-country e-commerce operation. Six months in, the reporting was answering the questions, not requiring translation.

Stage 3 — Ongoing controlling + CFO Studio

‍From here on, it's a monthly cadence: monthly reporting, board materials, CFO advisory. And in parallel, we're rolling out CFO Studio as Habys's analytical workspace — the same reporting layer we built, with a conversational AI layer on top, so the team can ask questions directly instead of waiting for a controller to pull the answer. Habys is one of the early CFO Studio deployments, which means they get to shape where the product goes.

• Redesigned chart of accounts for an e-commerce / multi-country business
• Documentation: booking procedures, account mapping, intercompany rules
• Power BI dashboards covering profitability per product, per channel, PL/DE consolidated
• Unit economics framework
• CFO Studio deployed as the analytical front-end for the leadership team

The most important thing we did at Habys was the boring thing: rebuild the chart of accounts so the leadership's questions could be answered from the books, not from someone's head. Everything else — the dashboards, the consolidation, CFO Studio — sits on top of that foundation. The order matters.

For family-owned businesses that have grown into multi-country structures, the work isn't replacing the finance function. It's redesigning it for the shape of the business it now needs to support — without disrupting what's working, and without losing the institutional knowledge that built it. That's the partnership Habys engaged us for, and it's the one we recommend for anyone in the same place.