topic Re: Ebay and Bookeeping in Selling

Ebay and Bookeeping

the-pet-shed — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 01:44:51 GMT

Hi all,

Is anyone able to tell me what information they use to enter into their accounting software? I'm finding the clear information incredibly confusion/frustrating. If I look at the financial statement it doesn't show me the sales for the month unless I add every line up! Which I have unfortunately done, when adding up all the sales and fees from the financial statement, 1. the fees do not match the tax invoice, 2. the sales do not match the performance report. I find nothing clearly matches and it's driving me insane.

All I want to enter is my sales for the month including any cancellations/refunds etc plus my invoice for the fees.

Can anyone help or advise what reports you use?

Re: Ebay and Bookeeping

davewil1964 — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 08:40:11 GMT

My accounting software is a spreadsheet. Manually updated. I don't sell at your levels - maybe 4 per day - but it works for me.

Re: Ebay and Bookeeping

domino-710 — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 23:57:44 GMT

Years ago the ATO introduced ' eRecord ' - a very simple bookeeping program - which they replaced with :

ABN CASHBOOK is a basic user-friendly program to record all of your business income and expenses whether you are GST registered or not. It is a great replacement for e-record, spreadsheets and manual records and assists in complying with ATO requirements.

Probably a download from the ATO site - not sure.

Re: Ebay and Bookeeping

folosite — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 05:58:42 GMT

Just download a sales report for previous month in CSV format and you will have all sales, fees and everything in the file

Re: Ebay and Bookeeping

p9games — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 06:12:45 GMT

Step 1 - speak to your accountant. Seriously. Don't take financial advice from randoms on the internet.

Step 2 - here's my advice 🙂

I use weekly payouts from Ebay which are paid to my company bank account. That is connected to my accounting software in which I reconcile all incoming and outgoing transactions, attach receipts and so on. My accountant can log in if he needs and uses it to rapidly prepare BAS, tax and financial statements.

At the end of each quarter I send him my starting and ending inventory balance and the Ebay Payout report for the quarter and he does the rest, with the info recorded in the accounting software.

Ebay sales reports only go for 90 days. The payout report you can run over longer periods and thus always capture the entire period. It contains gross sales, fees, returns and so on. It also shows which transactions have been made but not yet paid out, so my accountant can quickly compare the reported net amount to the combined value of the weekly payouts in the same period.

Depending on your system and the accounting software package you use, you can feed a lot of the detail in via API, system to system. I explored that but I have a catalogue of over 400,000 items (including variants) and the off the shelf API can only accommodate a few thousand. But depending on your catalogue size and systems in use, it might work for you.

Seek advice from your system vendor and your accountant.

Denis

Re: Ebay and Bookeeping

domino-710 — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 07:03:27 GMT

Just a question Denis - how do you send an item - $2.45 - free postage. ??

Re: Ebay and Bookeeping

imastawka — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 07:37:06 GMT

Postage for cards is only $1.10 domestic, Dom.

No biggie

Re: Ebay and Bookeeping

domino-710 — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 07:41:18 GMT

$2.45 - $1.10 = $1.35 - packaging - time - fees = ???

Re: Ebay and Bookeeping

imastawka — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 08:18:46 GMT

Fees would only be around 34 cents?

Packaging - recycled cardboard.

Time you can't count IMO

It's just the pure joy of selling something that counts

Re: Ebay and Bookeeping

domino-710 — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 08:23:22 GMT

LOL - a buck is a buck. 😀

Re: Ebay and Bookeeping

p9games — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 10:51:49 GMT

I sell trading cards. Envelope and a $1.10 stamp. In saying that an order for a single card doesn't make me any money, but people often buy 5, 10 or 20 or more at a time, at which point it's profitable. I liken my business to running a small corner store. You might make low margin on bread and milk but you always stock them because it attracts customers and while they are picking up those items they buy others which yield higher margins.

Re: Ebay and Bookeeping

chameleon54 — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 23:39:12 GMT

OP - This might help. Could also be useful to others with tax time coming up.

Go to selling. Where you see the bar graph with monthly sales you will see a little arrow symbol at the top right of this graph. Click on that and a report system will come up. The beauty of this one is you can customise it right down to a simple report for a designated period including the quarter or whole financial year if that is what you want. ( previous years too ) At the top it will show totals for all sales for the year, ebay costs for the year, net sales after selling fees, Auction or fixed price, sales via promoted listings etc. in simple one lump sum figure.

The only thing it doesnt easily cover is returns / refunds. You can then delve deeper and get a compete years listing of each individual item you sold if that is what you want, including a picture of the item and price. It seems to be 100% accurate.

I do my books manually ( its much quicker and more efficient than entering everything into computers on an ongoing basis each week or month ) and this is all I use. Look it up once a year, note the figures at the top of the report, forward them to the accountant along with some other stuff ( postage costs taken from bank statements for a designated postage credit card, stock purchases, estimate of stock on hand etc. ) and an hour or two later, job done for the year..

Re: Ebay and Bookeeping

chameleon54 — Wed, 06 Apr 2022 00:08:51 GMT

Its also worth noting, despite its MANY faults, this is one of the reasons ebay is the only game in town for small businesses who want to sell online legitimately. You dont get this sort of record keeping support from facebook marketplace or Gumtree. Using these reports you are declaring exactly the same numbers as the ATO will see if they happen to check or audit your accounts, without mistakes made in entering and re-entering data into computer spreadsheets or inevitable human error associated with running log books..