For years, East Coast Nurseries only saw financials at tax time—paper reconciliations, no live cash view, and a legacy ERP that couldn’t keep pace. Here’s how they moved to real-time reporting, automated AP, and a single Salesforce-native back office.
On the east end of Long Island, where 175 acres of ornamental plants spread across an open-air farm, East Coast Nurseries is doing something most growers don’t: running a 1,400-SKU operation on a unified platform from sales to finance.
But it wasn’t always that way.
Until recently, financial reports at East Coast Nurseries arrived once a year—only when an external accounting firm finished preparing taxes. Bank reconciliations were done on paper. Receipts and bills of lading lived in file cabinets stretching five wide and three drawers deep. For Gary Vogel, Managing Partner at East Coast Nurseries, that wasn’t the level of insight a growing business needed.
“I’d see financials six months after the year was done. It was completely useless,” Gary notes.
Today, things look very different. With Accounting Seed, Gary can pull up a real-time P&L. Bank balances update live with Bank Direct Connect. The accounting team has automated AP processes that replace hours of manual data entry. And the file cabinets? They’re emptying out.
Before joining the nursery industry, Gary spent his career as a software engineer. He wrote a mortgage bundling program for one of the most successful hedge funds in history. That technical training shaped how he approached running a plant farm, bringing logic, analysis, and process discipline to an operation full of moving parts.
“When you’re a technologist, it’s all about logic and analysis,” Gary explains. “At East Coast Nurseries, we’ve got a tremendous amount of details to manage on the farm. My background helped me figure out how to get control of all those details.”
The nursery industry doesn’t easily lend itself to physical automation. Plants of many different sizes and quantities make that difficult. Plants are shifted from one size to another; they change from sellable to unsellable for a host of reasons, and inventory is ever changing. They also have timing windows that depend on the weather, demand, and the rhythm of the planting calendar. With 1,400 different SKUs, each with their own needs, the complexity adds up fast.
“We are one of the few industries with an inventory product that changes state,” Gary says. “A brick doesn’t die. If you put a brick on a shelf in A2, five years later it’s still a brick on the shelf in A2. Plants change.”
What East Coast Nurseries needed was a unified platform that could handle the nuances of a living, changing inventory while also delivering accurate financials in real-time.
For years, East Coast Nurseries ran its day-to-day operations on a legacy industry ERP and outsourced its books to an external accounting firm using QuickBooks. Monthly transactions were exported and emailed off. Financial statements only came back at tax time. There was no monthly close, no live cash view, no way to customize a report.
“There was no active view of anything that was happening,” explains Melissa Olthoff, Controller at East Coast Nurseries. “Bank reconciliations were on paper. You couldn’t see a live view of your cash at any point in time.”
For Gary, the breaking point was clear. The old system wasn’t built for the way he wanted to run the business.
“We really wanted to get everything into one unified platform, and that’s what brought us to Accounting Seed on Salesforce,” Gary says.
The power of a unified platform with Accounting Seed became real for Gary the first time he opened a personal dashboard Melissa had built for him.
Because Accounting Seed is fully native to Salesforce, Melissa can build any report she needs in minutes—slicing data by account, vendor, customer, or any custom field the team configures.
“We didn’t even have something as basic as a monthly balance sheet and income statement before,” Melissa says. “Now I can build any report I need at any moment. That’s what Salesforce-native accounting does for you.”
Bank Direct Connect has eliminated another long-standing pain point: the wait for paper bank statements to arrive by mail. Where the team used to wait ten days after month-end to even start investigating transactions, they now see them live and resolve questions the same day, saving them weeks of time.
“Seeing your live cash situation on any given day is fabulous,” Melissa says. “You’re not panicking in the morning or finding out you have hardly any cash in the bank.”
A modern back office requires more than just visibility. It requires accounting principles applied consistently—something the prior system made difficult. In the past, expenses at East Coast Nurseries were booked when paid, not when they actually happened. Large customer pre-order deposits for plants that wouldn’t ship for six months were treated as revenue the day they hit the bank. The accrual method wasn’t being applied consistently because the system couldn’t really support it.
“Being able to amortize and accrue expenses properly has been huge,” Melissa says. “The unearned revenue functionality has been huge. Something that simple used to be out of reach.”
AP at East Coast Nurseries is one of the most labor-intensive functions on the farm. During the busy season, vendor invoices can include hundreds of plant SKUs per document. With AP Automation from Accounting Seed, that work is being compressed dramatically—payables created automatically from emailed invoices, supporting documents auto-attached to the record, and AI reading even the most complex multi-line invoices accurately. The team is also taking advantage of ACH payments to a growing set of vendors.
“A payable gets emailed to Accounting Seed and it creates the record and attaches the document,” Melissa explains. “That alone saves several minutes per invoice. With OCR and AI, even our most complicated royalty invoices—the ones with hundreds of lines—come back read accurately.”
For Gary, the move from a Wall Street career to running a 175-acre nursery was about more than a change of scenery. It was a change in what his work meant.
“Here, we’re dealing with living things that are beautiful,” reflects Gary. “Things that add an aesthetic element to people’s lives, provide oxygen, and help our environment.”
That sense of purpose runs through everything East Coast Nurseries does. Quality is the differentiator. Customer relationships are treated as the long game. And every detail on the farm—from the timing of a planting to the way an invoice is processed—ladders up to one mission: producing the highest-quality plants for their customers and bringing beauty into people’s lives.
With Accounting Seed on Salesforce, Gary and Melissa now have a back office that matches the standard they’ve built on the farm. The team isn’t chasing paper anymore. They aren’t waiting until tax season to see how the business is performing. They can focus on what matters most.
“Every process we had before was so labor-intensive, all manual,” Gary notes. “Accounting Seed lets us automate the tedious work so people are freed up to do more interesting and valuable things.”
East Coast Nurseries now has an accounting system that works within their world and provides real-time insight into what’s happening with the business at any given time, and that’s made all the difference.
“The ability to get what you want, how you want it, when you want it—that’s what Accounting Seed gives us. There’s never a question of ‘can you do this in Accounting Seed?’ because the answer is always yes.”
To learn more about East Coast Nurseries, visit eastcoastnurseries.com.
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