Uncorking Store Performance: Damien Smith, CTO of Australian liquor retailer Paramount Retail, shared how Connectorly is transforming management meetings by delivering real-time insights into store performance, budgets, and wage efficiency.
Overview
Paramount Retail operates two liquor retail brands across Australia – Bottle Stop and Barrel and Batch.
With 14 stores and more opening, the company competes in a margin-tight, highly competitive market where operational efficiency is critical.
Running stores at scale requires visibility into many moving parts – weekly manager reports, wage and journal entries from the accounts team, and revenue budgets set at store level.
Previously, budgets lived in spreadsheets, disconnected from Xero financials and Power BI dashboards. This created gaps in visibility, making it harder to track performance against targets or monitor wage efficiency.
Damien Smith explains:
“There’s just a lot of focus on the numbers because there’s no fat in our industry. We needed a way to see wages versus revenue and budgets in the same place.”
Challenge
Paramount Retail needed a way to consolidate store-level data — wages, revenue, and budgets — into a single, real-time view.
Traditional reporting left the management team without a clear picture of how each store was performing, slowing decision-making and making weekly meetings less effective.
Solution
Damien turned to Connectorly for Xero and Power BI to create a single source of truth for financial and operational performance.
Connectorly enabled Paramount Retail to:
- Seamlessly pull in store-level wage data and budgets from Xero.
- Consolidate financial and operational metrics into Power BI.
- Build dashboards that track revenue vs budgets and wages as a % of sales.
Other connectors were evaluated, but as Damien explains:
“Connectorly just worked first go. It had everything I needed, the price was fine — so I stuck with it. It works.”
Implementation
The onboarding process with Connectorly stood out from the start. Early questions and even a bug were quickly resolved, with Damien receiving a direct line of communication from the support team.
“That initial onboarding was super effective. Having that line of communication open from the get-go meant when I had a question, I could just hit reply – and someone was right there. Unlike other SaaS tools, I never felt left on my own.”
With Connectorly, Paramount Retail achieved:
- 14 stores consolidated into one Power BI view.
- 100% visibility of revenue vs budgets and wages.
- Real-time tracking of a 9–10% wage-to-revenue ratio.
- Zero downtime thanks to a reliable, always-on connector.
Success Drives Future Plans
By consolidating Xero and operational data into Power BI, Paramount Retail transformed its weekly management meetings.
Now, the leadership team can see at a glance which stores are hitting targets and which need attention. Wage costs can be benchmarked, and conversations focus on solutions, not missing data.
Damien sums it up:
“It’s changed the discussion in our management meetings. Instead of saying, we need to look into that, we can already see what needs attention and decide what to do about it.”
Encouraged by these results, Paramount Retail is continuing to expand, confident that Connectorly will remain a key enabler of efficient, data-driven decision making across its growing store network.
