Moonstone boosts e-commerce efficiencies with embedded banking solution

Incorporated in November 2021, Moonstone Ventures (Moonstone) is among the largest trading merchants of one of India’s leading online quick commerce platforms (“the qcom-marketplace”). Moonstone delivers from over 350 stores across 17 cities in India, with an average delivery time of less than 10 minutes¹.

The challenge

As one of the largest merchants, a substantial part of Moonstone’s purchase and sale of goods takes place on this qcom-marketplace platform. The qcom-marketplace supports Moonstone with inventory storage, listing of goods and last mile logistics for delivery to end customers in return for a variable fee, based on purchases and sales.

But the huge transaction volumes created challenges for Moonstone, including:

• Complexities in inventory and order management due to use of multiple systems, including Moonstone’s own management and accounting systems as well as that of the qcom-marketplace.
• Manual data reconciliation across different formats and systems, as well as lengthy posting of transactions delayed goods and services tax (GST) reporting, leading to potential fines and penalties.
• Challenges in vendor management, with over 300 -350 daily purchase orders raised to more than 300 vendors across product categories.
• Late deliveries settlements, mismanagement, and delays that impact order fulfilment and invoice generation, as purchases, sales and payments all happen on different platforms.

The transformation

Riding on HSBC’s partnership with tech company, Zoho, Moonstone tapped into a cloud-based ‘Beyond Banking solution’ that enables the company to manage business operations, cash flows, payments, and receivables – all through a single integrated platform. The solution facilitates:

• API integration with Zoho and HSBC. This allows Moonstone to directly initiate payments for open invoices at any time of the day, with invoices automatically knocked off upon payment receipt. The solution also facilitates the automation of bank payment entries, clearing of payment transactions and sending of payment advices.
• Integration of bank statements into Zoho for automated and real time reconciliation. Uncategorised transactions are now identified separately and processed into the appropriate ledgers to remove manual efforts.
• Building of middleware for improved data integration across systems. This allows for improved data management across multiple sources and enables automatic posting of entries in Moonstone’s own ERP system to streamline processing and reconciliation of data. Moonstone can now also access details of all payments made, overdue invoices, and excess payments etc. in real time.
• Operational efficiencies. The adoption of simple application platforms has enabled Moonstone to replace Excel and manual-based reconciliations and inject automation into accounting processes for more efficient book-keeping.

Success

• Significant time and resource savings to manage multi-invoice and, multi-vendor payments.
• Process efficiencies associated with balance reporting, downloading statements, and matching accounting entries through easily synced bank feeds with real time reporting of balances to help stay on top of the reconciliation.
• Eliminated need to manage multiple and inconsistent payment file formats. The HSBC-Zoho integration comes with inbuilt APIs that were quick to integrate and use.
• Improved controls. Moonstone could grant selective access to their accounts team for payment initiation, as well as complete control to authorise payments on HSBC Net banking/ mobile platform.