Partnership: EMAsphere partners with Control Room Finance to develop an e-commerce reporting pack

EMAsphere announces innovative partnership with Control Room Finance to tackle e-commerce reporting challenges with a dedicated reporting pack

EMAsphere and Control Room Finance, led by Fractional CFO Joe Newbold, have partnered to develop a tailor-made reporting pack for e-commerce businesses.

The goal? To finally bring together fragmented data from Shopify, inventory, accounting and other systems into one cohesive, reliable, and actionable management reporting.

A partnership born from real e-commerce challenges

For many fast-growing e-commerce companies, reporting is a daily struggle. Data lives in silos: Shopify handles sales, Unleashed tracks inventory, and Xero records invoices. As a result, metrics often don’t match up, leaving finance teams stuck in Excel, trying to make sense of inconsistent numbers.

In this situation, companies tend to blame finance teams, but as Joe told us during our recent interview: “The problem isn’t that finance is doing a bad job, but that we’re comparing apples to pears, when analyzing financial and operational data together...”

And that’s the reality that led us to this collaboration.

According to Bart Baute, CEO of EMAsphere: 

“From the first moment we spoke to Joe, it was clear that there is a match: Joe wants to offer strategic advice and focus on the analysis of the data. To do so, he needs a solution that can offer it all in one. His experience in e-commerce helps us to understand the sector better and integrate this expertise into EMAsphere, ready for the market.” 

Joe works with high-growth businesses across sectors, from D2C to manufacturing. But in the e-commerce world, he sees a consistent problem: reporting tools don’t reflect the full operational picture.

Joe Newbold, Fractional CFO and Founder of Control Room Finance:

"We partnered with EMAsphere, because we needed one clear, reliable view on data, coming from different sources...
Unleashed works well operationally, but its reporting wasn't giving us the insights we needed, especially for COGS and inventory. We were pulling data from multiple sources that didn't align."

A market ready for change

Today’s e-commerce companies don’t operate on one platform. They use:

• Shopify for front-end sales
• 3PLs and WMSs for logistics and fulfillment
• Xero for accounting
• Excel for anything that doesn’t fit elsewhere
  

These tools aren’t built to speak to each other, and existing reporting apps, especially in the Shopify ecosystem, only offer partial views.

What’s missing is a single source of truth, a unified view that connects sales, operations and finance, and that's what EMAsphere offers.

One pack. One platform. Built for e-commerce reality.

The EMAsphere x Control Room Finance reporting pack is built to close this gap.

It will offer a real-time, centralized reporting solution that:

• Consolidates Shopify sales with Xero invoice data
• Integrates inventory and manufacturing performance
• Captures key fulfillment metrics from WMS or 3PLs
• Tracks customer KPIs, debt collection, top clients, and more

For Joe, it’s not just about visualizations, it’s about clarity: “I want to stop spending Mondays formatting reports and explaining data gaps. If we can bring all this into EMAsphere, that’s a game-changer.”

Smarter than spreadsheets. Simpler than BI tools.

In today’s data-driven world, many businesses turn to BI tools like Power BI. But for finance teams, these solutions often come with a steep learning curve and technical dependencies.

As Joe puts it:

“While Power BI isn’t hard to learn, it still requires someone dedicated to managing the technical side. It’s not a plug-and-play solution. That’s why I see value in tools like EMAsphere, which offer the depth of a BI tool but with greater accessibility.”

Our goal with this reporting pack is exactly that BI-level insight, without the BI complexity.

How the CFO role is evolving with technology and data

There’s a lot of noise right now about how the CFO’s role is evolving and becoming more data-driven, more tech-savvy, more strategic. But as Joe puts it, CFOs have always been strategic.

Saving time at every turn is key, whether it's your finance team doing the reporting or the CFO, it's not the preparation that’s valuable, it's the commentary and insight. This solution gives us accuracy with speed, enabling CFOs to act with clarity and trust.

This reporting pack is designed for CFOs who want data they can trust, tools that actually save time, and a reporting framework that scales with the business.

Looking ahead: The future of e-commerce reporting

The EMAsphere x Control Room Finance partnership is just the beginning.

This new reporting pack will make it easier for CFOs and finance teams to:

• Automate operational reporting

• Gain real-time visibility across platforms

• Eliminate manual reconciliations

• Lead with confidence, not guesswork

Whether you're tracking sales spikes after a campaign, reconciling inventory across warehouses, or preparing investor updates, this pack is built to handle the fast pace and complexity of e-commerce finance.