Bookkeeping for Retail and Online Stores
One platform payout is not one number. It is gross sales, refunds, chargebacks, shipping collected and a handful of fees, netted into a single deposit. Code the deposit to sales and every figure downstream of it is wrong.
A Net Deposit Hides Four Different Numbers
Say a platform deposits $8,420 into your account. Coded as sales, that is what your profit and loss reports. What actually happened was $9,900 in gross sales, $420 refunded, $310 in shipping collected and $1,370 in fees.
Every consequence of that shortcut is bad. Your revenue is understated, so your growth trend is wrong. Your fees are invisible, so you cannot see that they have crept from 11% to 14%. Your GST is wrong, because the components have different treatments. And your gross margin is a fiction.
This is the single most common serious error we find in online retail files, and it is present in the majority of them.
- Revenue understated by the fees and refunds
- Platform fees never appear as a cost at all
- Refund rate invisible, so product problems stay hidden
- GST wrong on shipping and on overseas sales
- Gross sales, refunds, shipping and fees each in their own account
- Fees visible as a percentage, tracked month on month
- Refund rate reported, so a faulty line shows up early
- GST correct on domestic, export and imported stock
Across Every Channel You Sell Through
Multi-channel payout reconciliation
Your own store, the marketplaces you list on, the payment gateways and buy-now-pay-later providers. Each settlement broken into its components and reconciled to the platform’s own report.
Stock and cost of goods
Inventory movements reconciled between your store or POS and the ledger, with cost of goods recognised against the sale rather than when the stock was purchased.
GST on imports and exports
Imported stock with its GST and duty at the border, and export sales that are generally GST-free, both treated correctly rather than lumped in with domestic trade.
Margin after everything
Product margin calculated after platform fees, payment fees, shipping actually paid and the packaging that goes in the box, not just after the wholesale cost.
Bricks-and-mortar alongside online
In-store takings reconciled to the bank, and store versus online reported separately so you can see which channel is carrying the business.
Subscription and app costs tracked
The dozen or so apps, plugins and services an online store accumulates, coded and reported together so the total is visible rather than scattered.
Before You Ask
It is a good start and usually not sufficient on its own. Most connections push orders across correctly but leave the settlement side to be reconciled manually, and that is the step that gets skipped. The test is simple: does the platform payout in your bank reconcile exactly to the sales, fees and refunds recorded for that period? In most files we open, it does not.
It depends on your stock level and lead times. A store holding modest, fast-turning stock can be reported perfectly well with periodic stocktakes. Once you are holding significant value, or importing in containers, proper perpetual inventory earns its keep because otherwise your monthly profit is meaningless. We will tell you which side of that line you are on.
Moderately. Exports are generally GST-free, which needs to be coded as such rather than as standard sales, and foreign currency receipts need translating with the exchange difference recognised. Neither is difficult once set up correctly. Where you are approaching sales taxes in other jurisdictions, that is a conversation for your accountant and we will raise it.
We can tell you which ones make money after every cost, and which ones do not, which is usually the whole conversation. The commercial judgement stays yours, because sometimes a low-margin line brings customers who buy the profitable ones, and that is a decision about your business rather than about the spreadsheet.
Get Every Channel Reconciling
We will check one month of settlements against your ledger free of charge, then quote a fixed monthly fee from $25 a week to keep every channel reconciled.