""I want to take that person's attention to detail for repeatable tasks, that person's outside-the-box thinking, that person's can-do attitude. We got the best of everything from many different people, but we weren't paying for six full-time employees. That hybrid of cost effectiveness and total expertise was the best part about working with BELAY.""
— Elliott Cohen, Former Director of Finance
The Challenge
Ritual Zero Proof set out to solve a problem the beverage industry hadn't fully cracked.
Non-alcoholic beer and wine had been around for years, but no one had gotten the formula right for a non-alcoholic spirit, something with the taste, the burn, and the ritual of a real whiskey, tequila, gin, or rum, minus the alcohol. Elliott Cohen joined as the company's first finance employee, brought in through a relationship with BELAY that dated back to a previous food and beverage startup.
At the time, Ritual's books were about as basic as they could be.
"It was just a checking account," Elliott said.
There was no QuickBooks, no chart of accounts. Just a handful of transactions a month while the founders waited to see if early customers would come back for repeat purchases. But the company had a strategic investor waiting in the background: Distill Ventures, backed by Diageo, the global spirits company that would go on to acquire the brand.
Elliott knew that relationship would eventually come with real expectations.
"They are going to expect a level of professionalism. They're going to be on top of us," he said.
Ritual needed its financial foundation built right, and built early.
The Solution
BELAY came on about six months into revenue, once Ritual's early customers had proven they'd buy again, and got to work building the systems from scratch: chart of accounts, QuickBooks, and bill.com for invoicing and bill pay.
Elliott joined shortly after that setup was already in motion.
"I got to come in, and it's a wonderful feeling to come in and there's a clean set of financials," he said.
Instead of spending most of his time cleaning up books, he could focus on financial strategy from day one.
As Ritual grew, so did BELAY's role. The team took on inventory management support, learning a system built for smaller and mid-sized CPG brands so Ritual didn't have to figure it out alone. Then the pandemic hit, and Ritual's ecommerce business exploded, eventually growing past 60% of total revenue at its peak
Untangling the accounting behind that growth was its own challenge, since Amazon alone splits into Seller Central, Vendor Central, FBA, and FBM, and Ritual was running six or seven ecommerce platforms with different rules for revenue recognition, returns, and bundles.
"BELAY really took the ownership and the emphasis of helping us understand how ecommerce works from a financial accounting perspective," Elliott said. "We wouldn't have been organized or able to have done that without teaming up together."
That same attention to detail paid off in Ritual's monthly financial reviews. Because BELAY coded transactions at the channel and customer level from the start, Elliott could see profitability by sales channel in a couple of clicks, comparing standard wholesale against specialty distributors, or Amazon against Shopify.
"The financial meetings evolved and got smarter and smarter, so we didn't have to talk about the bookkeeping," he said.
BELAY's Deductions Management team also stepped in to navigate chargeback disputes with distributors like KeHE and UNFI, portals that don't come with instructions.
"They know how to enter into the system so you're not getting any type of error that would lead to you not winning a deduction," Elliott said. "It was pretty turnkey."
""Our investors just loved knowing that BELAY is an independent third party. It gives a strong sense of confidence that there's an independent third party vetting all of these monthly financials.""
— Elliott Cohen, Former Director of FinanceThe Impact
At its core, BELAY's team gave Ritual something hard to replicate in-house: deep, specific expertise without the cost of a full internal department.
"We probably would have needed to hire all six people in order to replicate what BELAY gave us, but we wouldn't have needed all six of them full-time," Elliott said.
When Ritual's investors evaluated the business, BELAY's role as an independent, credentialed third party gave them confidence in what they were looking at.
"Our investors just loved knowing that BELAY is an independent third party," Elliott said. "It gives a strong sense of confidence that there's an independent third party vetting all of these monthly financials."
When Diageo acquired Ritual Zero Proof, BELAY stayed on through an 18-month transition, winding down systems at a deliberate pace so nothing got lost in the handoff.
"It was as organized as possible," Elliott said.
Looking back at how far the business scaled with the same small BELAY team and the same core systems, from close to zero revenue to tens of millions of dollars a year, Elliott doesn't think they would have hit a ceiling anytime soon.
"I bet we could have scaled up to a hundred million dollars a year and still been okay working with BELAY," he said.
For other founders building a CPG brand, his advice is straightforward: get real accounting practices in place early, and find a partner who brings expertise instead of just headcount.
"I never would have been able to do ecommerce without BELAY's help," Elliott said. "If I'm ever part of a startup again, one of the first people I'll call is BELAY."
