Customer story · Painterland Sisters
See how this mission-driven dairy brand adopted The Accountrepreneur as a full-stack accounting and financial operations solution to support margin expansion and investor-grade financial reporting.
10-point
Gross margin expansion
136%
Year 1 net revenue growth
35%
Reduction in DSO
“The Accountrepreneur’s CPG expertise has saved us so much time and so many headaches as we’ve scaled. Having a partner who actually understands this industry has helped us double the business every year without losing margin.”
Hayley Painter, Co-founder and Co-CEO at Painterland Sisters
About Painterland Sisters
Painterland Sisters is a woman-owned, farmer-owned dairy brand founded in 2022 by sisters Hayley and Stephanie Painter on their family’s fourth-generation dairy farm. Since launching in 2022, Painterland Sisters has grown into a national brand, with its organic, high-protein, lactose-free Icelandic-style skyr yogurt now sold in retail locations across the country. Along the way, the brand has raised seed funding from leading investors and earned features in major outlets like Forbes and Women’s Health.
Challenge
Scaling from regional to national without losing margin or cash visibility
In six months, Painterland Sisters’ organic, lactose-free skyr yogurt went from a regional specialty item to a national presence in thousands of retail stores, including Sprouts and Whole Foods. Despite this new scale, Co-founders and Co-CEOs Hayley Painter and Stephanie Painter, the sisters behind the name, were relying on a regional accounting firm without national CPG experience.
The firm’s limited expertise showed up most clearly in day-to-day cash operations, where trade spend and receivables presented a particular challenge. Without a reliable cash application process to match retailer deductions and promotional allowance against invoices and receivables, it was hard for Painterland Sisters to know whether an expected payment would match the amount billed or how much a given promotion would reduce cash flow.
As a result, Hayley and Stephanie made spending decisions based on cash that might never materialize. A similar gap extended to payables. Growing vendor relationships and payment volume demanded a clear, forward-looking view of upcoming bills. But Painterland Sisters’ regional accounting firm didn’t have the systems or processes to provide this visibility, so unexpectedly large outflows became a persistent risk.
The need for an accurate cash position and forecast became more urgent as Painterland Sisters began raising a seed round. Misjudging their actual runway could have forced them into raising capital on worse terms, or giving up more equity than necessary, just to keep the business going. Costs posed a separate risk to the P&L, especially as Painterland Sisters was already operating on the tight margins typical of a dairy brand.
Without visibility into true landed COGS at the SKU level, Hayley and Stephanie couldn’t tell when input costs or broader market conditions were shifting, and by how much, until the impact had already hit the P&L. This left them reacting to margin pressure after the fact, rather than adjusting pricing or opening tougher conversations with vendors and retail partners before costs eroded profitability. When another founder recommended The Accountrepreneur, Hayley and Stephanie reached out.
As soon as they spoke with the team, they knew they’d found exactly the right partner for Painterland Sisters.
“We were scaling fast, raising money, and running a tight P&L. To avoid feeling like we were constantly in triage, we needed a partner who actually understood CPG nuances and could give us real, current numbers.”
Solution
Clean, investor-ready financials with The Accountrepreneur’s full-stack accounting support
The Accountrepreneur stepped in as Painterland Sisters’ outsourced accounting and financial operations team, taking over daily bookkeeping, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and month-end close processes. The team also redesigned the existing chart of accounts to fit a growing, multi-channel CPG brand and rolled out a new inventory management system to support the brand’s rapid growth.
From there, The Accountrepreneur has taken over the brand’s cash application process, reviewing Painterland Sisters’ promotional calendar to reconcile deductions against invoices as payments are received. The resulting retailer-level reporting on trade spend and deductions, including merchant cash back (MCB), scanback, everyday low pricing (EDLP), and direct store delivery (DSD) fees, gives Stephanie and Hayley visibility into how promotions impact revenue and contribution margins.
They’ve since optimized trade spend, keeping it roughly flat, even slightly down, as a share of gross sales, even as revenue has more than doubled. The Accountrepreneur has applied that same rigor to collections, so Painterland Sisters converts growth into cash more efficiently.
With clean accounts receivable visibility and consistent collections, cash arrives on schedule and as expected, and the days sales outstanding (DSO) has improved by more than 34%, all while bad debt has remained negligible despite eight-figure annual sales. To strengthen cost visibility, The Accountrepreneur delivers a consistent view of both upcoming cash obligations and the underlying unit economics driving margins.
The team manages accounts payable end-to-end and tracks COGS variances in detail, proactively flagging shifts driven by commodity prices, environmental factors, or other market conditions before they show up in the P&L. As costs change, this comprehensive visibility empowers Hayley and Stephanie to strategically adjust pricing and negotiate more confidently with vendors and retail partners.
The Accountrepreneur’s insights have enabled the brand to improve margins even as it has expanded distribution, a rare outcome in CPG, and especially dairy. With clean, current financials in place and both receivables and payables under control, Hayley and Stephanie raised a successful seed round to support product innovation, operational improvements, and distribution expansion.
“Now we have real clarity on what’s happening with our receivables and payables. We can validate what we’re getting paid and why, instead of guessing. So when our costs shift, we see it coming in time to act instead of just absorbing the damage.”
Results
Painterland Sisters frees working capital with a 35% DSO reduction
With The Accountrepreneur, Painterland Sisters overhauled their finance function to keep pace with their fast-growing, national CPG business. Hayley and Stephanie now have a full-stack accounting partner with CPG expertise to manage receivables, trade spend, payables, and COGS, empowering them to base key pricing, vendor, and investor decisions on specific, current numbers.
The transformation is clear:
10-point gross margin expansion
136% year 1 net revenue growth
35% reduction in DSO
Hayley and Stephanie continue to leverage The Accountrepreneur as they scale Painterland Sisters. Dairy remains an industry with thin margins, but with accurate financials and an expert team to guide them, they're positioned to grow both revenue and margin, instead of trading one for the other.
“The Accountrepreneur knows what they’re doing, and they do an excellent job. It’s lonely being a founder, but knowing they handle our full accounting stack means we can make confident decisions about the business and sleep a lot better at night.”
Stephanie Painter, Co-founder and Co-CEO at Painterland Sisters
Industry
Food & beverage
Founded
2022
Channels
National retail & ecommerce
