Ostra Coffee Roasters
Industry
Coffee roastery and cafés
Team
31 people
City
Seattle, WA
On Tarn since
January 2024
Dev Raman
Co-founder, Tarn customer
freed from an idle cash buffer
saved on the monthly cash review
container payments mapped a year
At a glance
Company
Ostra Coffee Roasters
Plan
Group
Connected
Cedar Bank
Ledgerly
Tallyhub
Northwind Payroll
Paying for coffee that arrives in spring
Ostra roasts for its three cafés and about forty wholesale accounts. Green coffee is contracted at harvest and paid in instalments as each container ships, sometimes four months before a bag is roasted. A single container can be $18,000 or more.
The cafés and the roastery are separate companies with separate accounts, so nobody saw the whole picture at once. To stay safe, Dev and his co-founder kept about $110,000 sitting in the roastery account at all times. It felt prudent, and it meant they put off a second wholesale delivery van for two years.
Every container on the calendar
On the Group plan, both companies sit in one consolidated forecast. Dev added each green coffee contract as a scheduled payment with its shipping dates, and the café takings come in daily from Tallyhub.
Now the forecast shows each container landing as a step down, months ahead, against the steady climb of café sales. The buffer is set to what the next three containers actually need, not a round number that felt safe.
Ostra’s upcoming payments, both companies combined. Container payments sit next to café takings.
Dev Raman
Co-founder
Cash that works for the business
Within three months Ostra lowered its standing buffer from $110,000 to $48,000 and used part of the difference to buy the second van outright. Wholesale deliveries went from three days a week to five.
The monthly review between the two founders now takes half an hour, because they start from one consolidated number instead of reconciling two spreadsheets.
The numbers, before and after.
Measured by the team, comparing the year before Tarn with the year since.
Measure
Before Tarn
With Tarn
