The finance stack for a small Indian D2C brand: tools, reports and weekly routines

The four sources of truth

Every Indian D2C brand, whatever its size, has money flowing through the same four places:

1. Your store (Shopify or WooCommerce): what was ordered, refunded and cancelled
2. Your payment gateway (Razorpay, Cashfree, PayU and others): what prepaid customers paid and what was settled
3. Your courier or aggregator: what was shipped, delivered, returned, what COD was collected and remitted, and what freight was billed
4. Your bank: what actually arrived

The finance stack is simply how you connect these four.

The minimum stack

• Accounting software your CA is comfortable with, for invoices, expenses and GST
• A reconciliation step that connects store, gateway, courier and bank
• A shared folder where each month's raw reports are saved, unchanged
• A claims list for every amount you are chasing

The weekly routine (20 minutes)

• Check settlements and COD remittances that arrived this week against expected dates
• Look at the list of delivered COD orders older than your remittance cycle
• Review refunds issued this week, especially large or partial ones
• Note the cash in the bank against bills due in the next two weeks

The monthly routine (half a day, less with tools)

• Download all four sources for the month
• Match orders to payments and remittances, and those to the bank
• Check freight bills against shipments
• Record gateway fees, COD fees and freight with their GST for your CA
• Update your contribution margin by product (see D2C unit economics)
• Close or follow up open claims

Common early mistakes

• Treating Shopify's sales report as revenue received
• Marking COD orders paid on delivery without checking remittance
• Letting refunds be processed by several people with no log
• Paying freight bills without checking weights
• Leaving reconciliation until the GST return is due

When to add people

A part-time bookkeeper makes sense once the weekly routine takes more than an hour. A finance lead makes sense when you raise money or manage several channels. Until then, a clear routine and good tools go a long way.

Where Veritally fits

Veritally is the reconciliation step in this stack. For Shopify, it runs inside your admin and reads orders live. For WooCommerce, it is a free, read-only plugin. Both match store, gateway, courier and bank, and give you the short list of money that did not arrive.