Ebay and Bookeeping

[the-pet-shed]

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?

[p9games]

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.

[chameleon54]

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.. 

[chameleon54]

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..