Competition window: May 21 – June 14, 2026
Submission deadline: Sunday, June 14 at 11:59 PM PT
Where to submit: Send your Loom and any Skills, HTML files, etc. to [email protected].
Challenge Data: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PYvrvnBaaYdMj7Eg2UDApQpr2Cs9uOfy?usp=sharing
You're the Senior Accountant at Ridgeline Foods — a mid-market CPG company based in Denver, CO.
Ridgeline makes premium trail mixes, nut butters, and protein bars sold DTC and through wholesale distribution. The company has grown fast: $28M in revenue, 140 employees, Series C. They run NetSuite as their ERP, Ramp for spend management, and Stripe for DTC billing.
It's the first week of May. April's books need to close by business day 8, and your CFO Marcus is already asking when the P&L will be ready. But you can't finalize the P&L until your accruals are booked — and your freight accruals are a mess.
Ridgeline ships product through three regional freight carriers:
All three carriers invoice between the 8th and 12th of the following month. Close is on business day 8. The invoices never arrive in time. In other words: you need to estimate and book April's freight expense now — before the invoices show up in mid-May — so the April P&L is accurate at close.
Your predecessor Denise handled this by averaging the last 3 months of invoices per carrier and booking that as the accrual. She was consistently off by $5K–$13K on a ~$90K monthly freight spend — sometimes over, sometimes under, and occasionally by five figures. Marcus, your CFO, is tired of the P&L being wrong by a freight truck's worth of money every month.
We will provide you with a data package containing:
Shipment activity data from your 3PL for April 2026 — every shipment that moved, including date, origin, destination, weight, units, carrier, and service level. (~160 shipments across all three carriers.) The shipment log includes a residential flag (used for Coastal's delivery surcharge) and a special_handling field that records any accessorial services (liftgate, inside delivery, appointment, etc.) requested on a per-shipment basis.