About Smith Teamaker
Smith Teamaker is a premium tea company based in Portland, Oregon, founded by Steven Smith, the entrepreneur behind Tazo and Stash Tea. The company blends and packs teas and herbal infusions in small batches, sourcing directly from the world’s best producing regions. Smith Teamaker sells direct-to-consumer through their Shopify storefront and Portland tasting room, across marketplaces like Amazon and Faire, and through wholesale channels via EDI.
Website
Industry
Food and Beverage
Integrations
The Challenge
Smith Teamaker was in the middle of a NetSuite implementation when they realized the out-of-the-box integrations weren’t going to cut it. The company sells through a mix of channels: their Shopify storefront, Amazon, Faire, wholesale accounts via EDI, and a physical tasting room in Portland that runs on Square. Each channel has its own order flow, payment processing, and accounting requirements. Getting all of that data into NetSuite accurately and automatically was going to require more than standard connectors.
Before working with Hairball, the team was running on what Smith Teamaker described as “a very rudimentary system”. The standard integration options might have technically worked, but they wouldn’t have handled the custom data flows the business needed. And without those custom flows, the team would have been stuck with manual processes, delayed financial data, and the kind of errors that come from stitching together multi-channel accounting by hand.
The other challenge was scope. This wasn’t a single-channel integration project. Smith Teamaker needed to connect five distinct sales channels to NetSuite, each with its own logic, and then layer on payment reconciliation for Amazon, Afterpay, and Square. The reconciliation piece was especially critical for the Square POS channel, where payouts from in-store sales can land weekly or monthly, and matching those deposits back to individual transactions is tedious and easy to mess up without automation.
Key Issues
1. No Custom Data Flow from Sales Channels to NetSuite
Smith Teamaker was implementing NetSuite but had no way to create customized integrations between their sales channels and the ERP. Standard connectors couldn’t handle the specific order flow logic each channel required, which meant the team would have been stuck manually processing and reconciling data across systems.
2. Square POS Reconciliation Gap
Smith Teamaker’s Portland tasting room runs on Square. Square collects payment at the register, holds the funds, and deposits them to the bank on a weekly or monthly schedule. Without an automated reconciliation process, the accounting team had no efficient way to match individual in-store transactions (orders and refunds) against combined bank deposits.
3. Multi-Channel Payment Reconciliation
Beyond Square, Smith Teamaker also needed reconciliation for Amazon settlements and Afterpay payouts. Each payment processor has its own payout schedule, fee structure, and reporting format. Reconciling all of them manually was time-consuming and left room for discrepancies in financial reporting.
4. Growing Channel Complexity
The business was actively expanding its sales footprint. Shopify and Amazon were already live, but Faire and Orderful (EDI) were part of the picture too. Each new channel added another layer of integration complexity and another source of financial data that needed to land in NetSuite correctly.
The Solution
Hairball built Smith Teamaker’s integration layer from the ground up, connecting each sales channel to NetSuite through Celigo and layering on automated reconciliation where it mattered most. The project happened in phases, with each integration building on the foundation of the last.
Multi-Channel Order Integration
Hairball connected Smith Teamaker’s four primary sales channels to NetSuite through Celigo:
- Shopify for DTC orders through smithtea.com
- Amazon for marketplace orders
- Faire for wholesale marketplace orders
- Orderful for EDI-based wholesale orders from trading partners
Each channel required its own flow configuration to handle the specific order formats, payment methods, tax treatment, and fulfillment paths that Smith Teamaker’s business needed. The custom flows that Hairball built went well beyond what standard integration templates could deliver.
Payment Reconciliation Suite
On top of the order flows, Hairball implemented automated payment reconciliation for three distinct payment processors.
Amazon Settlement Reconciliation matches marketplace transactions against Amazon’s settlement reports, accounting for fees, refunds, and adjustments before moving reconciled amounts to deposited funds in NetSuite.
Afterpay Reconciliation handles the buy-now-pay-later payout cycle, matching customer orders and refunds against Afterpay’s disbursements.
Square POS Reconciliation is the standout. Hairball built what is currently the only Square reconciliation solution running on Celigo. The flow works like this: Square processes in-store transactions at the Portland tasting room. Hairball’s integration matches those individual transactions, including both orders and refunds, against Square’s bank deposits. Once everything checks out, the reconciled funds move to deposited funds and then to the bank record in NetSuite. The entire process is automatic. It took about a week to build and deploy.
This reconciliation approach is similar in architecture to what Hairball has built for other food and beverage clients, but the Square component was new ground. No other Celigo partner had built a reconciliation solution for Square before this project.
The Results
Smith Teamaker now has five sales channels and three payment processors connected to NetSuite through Celigo, all running automatically.
Five integrations live: Shopify, Amazon, Faire, Orderful (EDI), and Square POS are all connected to NetSuite through Celigo, replacing manual data entry and disconnected processes.
One-third of workload automated: According to Andrew, “the custom flows Hairball set up for us automated at least a third of our workload, allowing us to focus on higher value projects.”
Accurate financial data across every channel: Automated reconciliation for Amazon, Afterpay, and Square means the accounting team no longer spends hours matching transactions to bank deposits. The data is accurate, and the reconciliation runs without manual intervention.
First-of-its-kind Square reconciliation on Celigo: Smith Teamaker is running the Square POS reconciliation solution built on the Celigo platform, giving them automated financial matching for their in-store tasting room sales.
A foundation for continued growth: Smith Teamaker came to Hairball during their NetSuite implementation for the initial Shopify and Amazon integrations. After seeing the results, they came back for Faire, Orderful, and finally Square. Each new channel plugs into the same connected system.
