@cushioncovers wrote:I keep a running Excel spreadsheet of monthly expenses so I can add everything up for tax purposes. Was going throough one of the CSV downloads this arvo and realised that the monthly report DOES NOT INCLUDE THE STORE FEE! Considering that I'm paying the better part of $60pm, that's over $700 I didn't claim for tax deductions last year.
So, now I see that in you have to look in 2 different places for your fees for tax purposes - the Ebay Invoice to see the store/subscription and FVF fees as well as the CSV download to get the Paypal total.
Ugh!
The eBay CSV file(s) are a bit iffy I'll admit but all the info is there.
They do take a bit of re-formatting to keep eXcel happy though.
The best thing to do is sign up on your Account Summary page for the periodic CSV download.
It comes through near the end of the month and the formatting is better than the one you can download from the invoice page.
With the store fees, I just put in a daily figure as that works out better for profit and loss calculations.
(monthly store fee X 12)/365
That way you only have to do it once a year (or twice last year after they went up).
The Sci units need conversion to numbers.
I like to refomat the dates to short date after they've been converted to actual dates (they're not readable as dates as is) using:
Convert Text to Columns Wizard:
Create 2 new columns to the right of Date column
While holding down "Alt" press "D" then "E"
From the pop-up choose "Fixed Width" then click "Next"
Do nothing to the next screen, just click "Next" again.
In the final screen select "Date" and "Finish"
You'll now have the first 3 columns reading as Date, Time and Tome Zone (PDT so not very Aussie lol)
You can then delete the two columns you created and voila, you now have real dates.
Geez Louise eBay, you don't make it easy!
Gallery Plus and Picture pack lines get the find/replace (with nothing) routine and the rows deleted.
(Select the column, hit F5, select blanks, delete rows)
That leaves only FVF's (sale and post), labels (if used), Insertion fees (if any) and Promotional (free) inserts.
I also had to come up with a formula to get rid of the lousy apostrophes at the beginning and end of the titles.
(they didn't used to be there but some idiot rewrote the database extraction routine and (as is usual) mucked it up.
It also suits me to get rid of the additional text after sold item titles using find ;* and replacing with nothing.
Once you've done all that, and any aesthetic tidying up you feel appropriate, you have a useful eXcel compatible invoice you can do sums, counts, totals and any other tricks you like.
I've got it down to about 5 minutes of fiddling once a month so no great effort though it did take a while to work out.
For actual income, I use the PayPal Monthly Sales Report which is quite good as it gives you all your sales, refunds etc.
It needs some reformatting too but nowhere near as much as the eBay catastrophe.
I've got all my other inputs on different worksheets in the same workbook so I can now just input a date range and derive all the tax numbers or profit and loss.
