RIP-IT Sports Identifies $200K in Held-Up Receivables with SPS MAX

The Challenge

When Allen Thompson joined RIP-IT, the company sold two product lines with very few systems. Growth meant more retailers, more SKUs, and more invoices, but the team was still managing inventory and orders by feel.

That gap showed up hardest during demand spikes. Early on, orders kept coming into QuickBooks while the warehouse ran out of product the system said it still had.

After RIP-IT moved to NetSuite and built out its retail network, the same root problem resurfaced in a new form: invoicing. Dick’s Sporting Goods alone could send 120 orders for volleyballs at once, each requiring a separate invoice. The team captured the paperwork, but nobody could confirm every advance ship notice actually went out. When a required shipping field for Target went unfilled for weeks, invoices tied to those shipments started getting rejected, and rejected invoices meant aged, unpaid AR. By the time anyone traced it, the fulfillment team’s gap had generated $200,000 in held-up receivables, a slow leak nobody in accounting could see coming from operations.

The Solution

RIP-IT runs its order-to-cash cycle through SPS Commerce Fulfillment, integrated directly into NetSuite.

“NetSuite and SPS Fulfillment have become the backbone of how we operate. It’s the connected ERP and EDI move I wish we’d made a decade sooner.”
— Allen Thompson, COO, RIP-IT Sports

Orders, acknowledgements, ASNs, and invoicing flow between RIP-IT and its retail network without the manual re-entry that used to eat up the team’s time. That foundation is what let Allen Thompson layer MAX on top of it, without adding a separate tool or a separate login for his team to learn.

When the fulfillment team quietly stopped filling out a required shipping field for Target, MAX caught it inside the first week and surfaced every invoice the gap had touched.

“MAX turned an invisible $200K gap into a fixable problem overnight.”
— Allen Thompson, COO, RIP-IT Sports

Thompson pulled that list into RIP-IT’s own systems and traced the pattern himself: the missing field connected directly to roughly $200,000 in late accounts receivable. Work that used to be invisible to operations, buried inside a manual invoicing process, was now something the team could see and fix immediately. 

“Before MAX, fulfillment gaps were invisible. Now MAX flags them in week one.”
— Allen Thompson, COO, RIP-IT Sports

Thompson has since pushed MAX into a second use case: verifying that every ASN tied to Dick’s Sporting Goods volleyball orders was actually sent, instead of hoping the manual process held. A green check mark now confirms it did. He describes the appetite internally as constant. His team keeps building; he keeps asking for more access and more tools.

The results

MAX turned a blind spot into a fixable problem inside its first week live. The missing shipping field on Target orders was tied to roughly $200,000 in aged accounts receivable, invoices that had gone unpaid because fulfillment data was incomplete, not because the retailer disputed the sale.

“We didn’t lack inventory. We lacked visibility into what we actually had. Now MAX makes it visible, so we can fix problems right away.”
— Allen Thompson, COO, RIP-IT Sports

RIP-IT now uses MAX to confirm ASNs are sent for high-volume accounts like Dick’s Sporting Goods, replacing a manual check nobody had time to run consistently. 

Thompson ties both wins to the same outcome: fewer chargebacks and a direct improvement to profit margin, recovered from a workflow gap the operations team could not see on its own.

Lessons Learned

Fourteen years scaling RIP-IT’s operations taught Allen Thompson a few lessons worth passing on to other operators:

1. Build capacity plans before the season exposes you. RIP-IT’s business has aggressive seasonal spikes around back-to-school and spring. Operational disciplines you tolerate at low volume become full-blown problems the moment volume triples. Fix those before you turn up the volume, not after.
2. Invest in software before you can prove the ROI on paper. Early on, RIP-IT stuck with spreadsheets because the return on a new system was hard to quantify in dollars. The cost showed up instead as hours lost in meetings and errors that technology would have caught. Don’t wait for a clean business case if the pain is already visible.
3. Specialize your team by account once you outgrow generalists. Different retailers carry different rules and requirements. Assigning team members to specific accounts, once you have the headcount, works better than expecting everyone to master every retailer’s quirks.
4. Treat “boring” as the goal, not a lack of ambition. RIP-IT’s growth was once capped by things the team couldn’t see — inventory counts in the early days, then invoicing gaps once the company scaled onto NetSuite. Thompson doesn’t measure success by activity, he measures it by quiet: fewer fires, because the team can now see problems and fix them before they compound.

To learn more about SPS Commerce solutions, request a demo today.