Shark Wheel is a Southern California wheel company that is literally reinventing the wheel. They have produced a new type of a 540° sine wave-shaped wheel that outperforms the traditional wheel in almost every use – from skateboarding and roller skates through to luggage, forklift wheels and tractor tires.
The latest breakthrough Shark Wheel has had is with its new farming wheel – the company has signed a major deal with Bridgestone-Firestone, the world’s largest tire manufacturer. After developing this new wheel with the help of government research funding, Shark Wheel is ready to develop the idea further together with Bridgestone-Firestone.
“Our agriculture wheel was actually funded by the US government in three grants through the National Science Foundation,” says Zack Fleishman, Shark Wheel CEO. “It took well over four years of testing, failures and successes to finally get where we are now – the best-in-industry wheel that saves farmers over $26,000 a year.”
Shark Wheel’s key innovation is that, due to its dispersed structure, it doesn’t drive over the same path, which minimizes trench digging.This allows farmers to save time and money on equipment failures and repairs, and doesn’t damage the fields it drives over like a traditional tractor wheel does.
As the company has grown rapidly and evolved from an R&D focused organization to a sales and growth based company, they have had to reorganize and centralize their business systems. This has included their accounting systems and the interconnected apps that manage their ecommerce, logistics and inventory challenges – such as reconciling sales across multiple vendors. They chose Xero and ecommerce specialist Synder to do the job.
With over 250 SKUs and hundreds of pallets of inventory, Shark Wheel’s existing accounting and inventory systems didn’t provide the necessary level of detail and couldn’t integrate with the other platforms that they had in use for ecommerce sales and logistics.
This meant that their response rates were slow, the system was too complex and a large amount of data had to be managed manually by the CFO.
Creating a centralized source of truth
Zack was looking for solutions that could not only combine and streamline the work across all the different parts of the business, but automate wherever possible to increase efficiencies.
The solution Shark Wheel went with connected their systems to Xero for accounting, and Synder for ecommerce and data management, merging them into a single source of truth. Instead of having a CFO and bookkeeper who are manually trying to look at different systems and figure things out, the team has one central dashboard that features all the data they need – all in the cloud, and accessible online, anytime and anywhere in the world.
“Synder connects like a spider web to everything that we have in our ecosystem and collects data from everywhere – from our eBay sales to our website’s sales – and pulls it into Xero. We actually have 5 different websites right now on BigCommerce and we don’t have to do anything. It’s all automated,” says Zack.
This makes everything ready for quick reconciliation, matching the fees and sales to balance the books. Shark Wheel has cut costs and increased efficiency while ensuring the accuracy of their reports. The reduction of manual data entry alone has given staff more time to focus on growing the business.
“This integration opened up so much time during the day. Now we have more time for sales, more time to find new customers, and more opportunities to address things that really matter,” says Zack.
“We’re excited to enter agriculture, the second largest industry in the world. And now that we’ve got the accounting side figured out, we can aim even higher.”
Synder is an ecommerce accounting solution providing seamless synchronization, detailed data management, accurate reporting and actionable business insights for 4,500+ ecommerce and SaaS businesses in the US, UK, Australia and Canada.
Check out Synder on the Xero App Store here.