The Seller Ledger team has released a number of enhancements to help you get more insights from your eCommerce financial data.
View Profit or Loss by Sales Channel
Are you a multi-channel seller? Have you wanted to view the sales and expenses specifically for one of those channels? Well, now you can. We have added a new “filter” under the Profit and Loss report:
You may also notice in that screenshot above, a new report for “Expenses by Vendor.” If you missed our previous blog post announcing that, you can learn more about it here.
Select a date range in Account views
While we have had this available in the Income and Expense tabs for a little while, we also recently rolled out the ability to select a custom date range when you click into any account view from your Dashboard:
More forgiving date selector
We have heard from a number of users that the date selector can be finicky, especially when trying to type in dates (the final value, year, often reacted too quickly.) This has now been improved. If you try typing in the start or end date rather than selecting from clicking the calendar icon, you should see a significant improvement.
We’ve made several changes over the past few weeks to make it easier to see the most important information on your Seller Ledger screen.
Account balance details
When clicking into an account view from your Dashboard, we had previously shown the balance details at the top (including totals funds, available funds, etc.) by default. However, because customers tend not to rely on these details every time they click into the account, we have moved them under a new “Balance” button:
Click the green “Balance” button to see the balance detail information:
Click on the same button to hide these details. This reduces valuable vertical screen real estate and fits more transactions on the screen.
Rapidly categorizing transactions
Again, in an effort to make better use of vertical screen real estate, we’ve also changed the interaction for bulk editing of uncategorized transactions, pleasing everything on the same row:
Changing category of individual transactions
In an effort to make each transaction row more readable, and to save space, we have combined the visual cue for changing a transaction category with the category name, especially for uncategorized transactions:
Please let us know what you think of these changes by contacting us at [email protected]
As we all work our way through the 2023 tax season, the team at Seller Ledger has begun working on improvements to help give you better insight into your business.
Expenses by vendor
You will notice a new report under the “Reports” tab – one called “Expenses by Vendor”:
This report is made possible because of some important functionality we’ve added to transaction tracking. As you can see from the following example, there is now a new “contact” field in Seller Ledger account views, labeled as “Transacted with”:
This field allows Seller Ledger to group spending amounts by the name of each “contact”.
Now, you may notice that the information coming in from banks and credit cards is hard to group unless the names here make sense. This can be due to a variety of reasons:
Paper checks – In those cases where you must write a paper check to a vendor, most banks simply provide a description about the check itself, not the name of the vendor.
Very long, hard to decipher descriptions – Sometimes we just can’t tell who the vendor or customer is. In those cases, we default to “Unassigned.”
Similar, but not quite identical names – This varies by bank, but sometimes they use very small variations in vendor names that can make it hard to group transactions together
Fortunately, Seller Ledger has implemented a number of features to help you quickly edit these contact names.
Editing Contacts
Next to each “Transacted with” name, you’ll now see an edit icon. Click that to either choose a “contact” that’s already in the system, or add a new one:
Now, editing each transaction one at a time might make sense for paper checks, but for most imported transactions, you’re going to want to edit them in bulk. And for that, we’ve added each of the following capabilities:
Multiple select: choose multiple transactions and edit them in one step.
Filter by “unassigned”: to see all of your transaction where we are unable to guess at a contact name, choose “unassigned” from the list of filter options.
Sort by “Transacted with” and by “Description” fields: for those pesky, small variations of the same name, it sometimes helps to sort so that similar names are grouped together.
Hopefully, this helps provide a bit more insight into how your business is doing. Stay tuned for more updates along these lines, as we have big pans for 2024.
For eCommerce merchants who want to track their inventory stock levels and per-item gross profit, we’ve now made it easier for higher volume sellers to load their inventory information into Seller Ledger.
If you make large purchases from certain vendors, and don’t want to type all of those items into Seller Ledger, there’s now an easy way to upload your items (and cost information) via a CSV file. Simply generate a comma-separated file that contains columns with headings of “sku“, “product name“, “quantity” and “total cost” and upload it inside of any of your inventory purchase transactions.
Not only can this help you save time when entering purchase information, but it comes in particularly handy if you want to start the year off fresh, or import inventory from another platform.
To help eCommerce sellers better match the 1099-Ks that get filed by online payment providers, Seller Ledger today announced support for local US based time zones.
Why is this important?
When Seller Ledger imports your transaction history from different online sales channels and banks, we receive them with timestamps (which, if you’re curious, might look something like “Tue, 26 Dec 2023 15:14:01.753000000 UTC +00:00”) You may notice the “UTC” in there – that stands for Universal Time Coordinated (it used to be called Greenwich Mean Time) and it’s 5 hours ahead of EST (or 4 hours ahead during daylight savings.)
However, online marketplaces, when providing transaction totals and reports, tend to use the customer’s local time zone to calculate those totals. So, to help make sure you can match the numbers that online marketplaces are reporting (and be consistent with the IRS from year to year,) we have now added the same time zone support.
Seller Ledger now allows you to search among your income and expense transactions. In addition to filtering transactions by date range or category, you can also now search using specific words that show up in your transaction descriptions.
For example, let’s take a look at a full list of “Income” transactions below:
Now let’s say I wanted to see just the sales of Hess Trucks with the “Dragster” included. Simply type “Dragster” into the “Search” box, hit return and voila:
We know folks have also requested similar search capability within Inventory, and that is on the list. In the meantime, please let us know what you think of this functionality, especially any ways that we can make it better by emailing us at [email protected].
To help reduce data entry for poorly support banks and credit cards, Seller Ledger has now added the ability to import transaction history via CSV formatted files.
This will come in handy in a couple of scenarios:
Poorly supported banks
While we do have great coverage of most banks and credit cards through our banking partner, Plaid, we have learned of a few cases where a certain bank or account type isn’t well supported (often from small regional credit unions.) In these cases, if your bank or credit card account is not well supported via direct integration, you can add a new account that supports CSV-formatted files.
Just click “Add an account” from your dashboard, and on the right-hand side of your screen, you will see a new link under the Add Bank… button.
Clicking that link brings you to a new screen where you can choose the type and name of your bank or credit card account:
Choose the type of account, give it a name and click “Create Account.” Doing so will add a new account to your dashboard and allow you to upload a CSV file of your transaction history, much like you can do for Poshmark and Mercari.
Then go to your bank or credit card’s website and download transaction history using the CSV (aka “comma-separated”) format.
Also note: for any customers still in their trial period, Seller Ledger still applies the same 90-day history window, and will ignore transactions outside that range.
Banks with limited transaction history
As a policy, we ask customers to commit to an annual plan in order to go back and get more than 90 days of transaction history. While we have a good track record with online sales channels and many banks, some banks simply do not provide more than 60 or 90 days. Fortunately, this new CSV file support allows you to go back and upload older transaction history. Just click into your connected bank or credit card account, choose the Upload History tab (as seen above,) and upload the CSV file you downloaded from your bank.
We continue to make this new CSV feature more flexible, so if you come across an issue, please let us know at [email protected] and we’ll work to improve it.
We are pleased to announce that Mercari sellers can now import their sales report into Seller Ledger.
Like Poshmark, Mercari does not provide a public API, so we can’t automatically grab your transaction history like we can with Amazon, eBay and Etsy. But, just as we do with Poshmark, we allow you to upload the Mercari sales report.
Step 1: Download your Mercari sales history
In your Mercari account, navigate to the Seller dashboard (under your profile image.) From there, click on “Sales report.” You will be asked for both a beginning and end date for your transaction report. Once you have selected the date range, click the “Generate report” button.
You should see a .csv file generated, with a name that begins with “Custom-sales-report” and ends with the date range you selected. Download that file to your computer.
Step 2: Add a Mercari account in Seller Ledger
When you click the “Add account” button under Connected Accounts on your Seller Ledger dashboard, you will now see an option to “Connect to Mercari.”
After clicking the Mercari button, enter a name for your new account and click “Create Account”
Step 3: Upload your Mercari sales report file
Once you’ve created your new Mercari account, you’ll see it among your list of connected accounts on the Dashboard. Note the icons that differentiate between accounts that automatically connect and those that require CSV files be uploaded.
Clicking into the balance shown for your new Mercari account and click the “Import History” tab. Here you will see the option to upload a CSV file. Choose the file you downloaded from Mercari and click “Save.” Your file will be uploaded and your transaction history will be imported into Seller Ledger.
Trial users
If you are still in your trial period, Seller Ledger will only import the last 90 days of transaction history, regardless of how large your Mercari file is.
Step 4: Categorize your Mercari payouts properly
If you have connected a bank account to Seller Ledger, there’s a good chance your Mercari payout totals are showing up there. To ensure that nothing is getting double-counted, make sure to categorize those payouts as transfers. Simply scroll to the bottom of the categories list and find your new account.
Step 5: Remember to regularly update your Mercari sales in Seller Ledger
Because we can’t pull in your new sales and expense information on the daily, you’ll want to make sure to come back every once in a while to upload your latest sales history. How often you choose to do so is your choice. We show the date of the most recent imported transaction on the Seller Ledger dashboard to help remind you.
Lastly, if you make a mistake with any of your uploaded information, it’s not a problem. The “Import History” tab shows you all of the files you’ve uploaded over time, with the ability to simply delete one or more and try again.
We know there are other channels out there that provide CSV files of transaction history. If you would like to see other channels supported, please email us at [email protected] with your interest and, if you’d like to be particularly helpful, a sample of a transaction history file from that channel.
As of the writing of this article, it appears likely that the lowered 1099-K threshold of $600 in gross payment amount will go into effect for tax year 2023. This is causing much anxiety among small sellers, and with good reason.
To help illustrate how much confusion and complexity is about to be created for small online sellers, we did research to identify some pretty common scenarios sellers might encounter that make for very interesting 1099-Ks and tax returns.
For example:
Inconsistent Gross Amount calculations
1099-Ks have been around since 2011. But did you know that, after 12 years, different platforms are still using different calculations in terms of what gets included in the Box 1 amount? See several examples as we look at the treatment of sales tax.
Selling personal items among your business inventory
Do you track your personal sales separately from your business sales? Because eBay, Poshmark and others don’t. You get a single 1099-K for all sales on each platform. Yet what if you sold some personal items at a loss? Personal items don’t get treated the same as normal business sales. We took a deep dive into this scenario, to help walk sellers through what to do.
Consignment sales
As a reseller of someone else’s items, you may be collecting the full amount of the sale, which will be reported on your 1099-K. Except your income is really only the commission you receive from the sale. How are you supposed to account for this? Learn more as we share what we’ve uncovered.
Disclaimer
Don’t stress
Our intent in pulling these example together is not to increase fear or anxiety. We believe there is ample evidence that the entire situation is imperfect, and what the IRS cares the most about is that you pay the correct amount of tax that your business owes. With reasonable bookkeeping, it shouldn’t be too hard to handle these scenarios. At Seller Ledger, we pull in your detailed sales and expense information to make this as simple as possible. We also offer a 30-day free trial, no credit card required.
It is our belief that Congress does not fully understand the unnecessary complexity they have created, especially for small sellers. So, we encourage sellers to get involved and send a message to Congress. Click either of the buttons below to be taken to a place to make your voice heard:
Back when we first launched, we wrote a blog post about 1099-Ks and where sellers can expect to find the amounts that make up the total in Box 1a (Gross amount of payment card/third-party network transactions.) At the time, we were referencing eBay’s calculations.
But, as we approach the end of the tax year, we’ve learned that different platforms calculate their Box 1a amounts differently, often around whether or not sales tax collected is included.
Below is a sample of our findings – if you discover more and want to pass them along, we’re happy to update the list.
Sales tax NOT included in Box 1a
For example, the following platforms indicate in their documentation that sales tax is likely NOT included in the gross amount reported to the IRS:
Ebay
In their help page, eBay states: “Additionally, Form 1099-K does not include the sales tax when it is automatically collected and remitted by eBay.”
Poshmark
This support page from Poshmark states: “Your Form 1099-K will only include income as calculated by gross sales (including fees, refunds, and cancelled orders) on the Poshmark platform.”
Etsy
Their help page is a bit less clear, stating that the gross sales includes “Sales tax collected by you.” However, just below that, they make this statement: “In some cases, Etsy collects sales tax from buyers and remits it to tax authorities on behalf of sellers. If Etsy has collected tax on your behalf, these amounts won’t appear on your 1099-K form.”
Sales tax included in Box1a
However, other platforms either don’t spell it out very clearly or imply the opposite – that sales tax collected IS included in the Box 1a amount:
This page from their help center states that their Unadjusted Gross Payment combines various amounts, including: “Sales tax charged to buyer (a separately stated sales tax paid by the Buyer at the time of purchase and remitted directly to the state under Mercari’s sales tax registration)”
Square, Shopify and likely most shopping cart platforms
The content in this page should not be construed as legal or tax advice. Please consult an attorney or tax professional regarding your specific tax situation.
Creating confusion
The IRS’s own instructions for Schedule C provides a great starting point for confusion. Looking at the instructions for Line 23 (expenses for taxes and licenses,) you will find the following two statements:
You can deduct the following taxes and licenses on this line.
State and local sales taxes imposed on you as the seller of goods or services. If you collected this tax from the buyer, you must also include the amount collected in gross receipts or sales on line 1.
and
Do not deduct the following.
State and local sales taxes imposed on the buyer that you were required to collect and pay over to state or local governments. These taxes are not included in gross receipts or sales nor are they a deductible expense. However, if the state or local government allowed you to retain any part of the sales tax you collected, you must include that amount as income on line 6.
Clear as mud, right?
Adding to the confusion, there are statements from some “experts” that it’s critical to have your tax return line up with the forms that the IRS receives. But if you are a multi-channel seller, and the IRS receives multiple 1099-Ks that are based on different calculations, how are you supposed to get your amounts to line up?
It is unlikely that members of Congress understood the full potential for inconsistency when they introduced Form 1099-K for the 2011 tax year. Yet it has remained relatively unchanged for the last 12 years. And now, with the threshold for “gross amount” dropping to $600, this confusion will impact more small sellers than ever.
It doesn’t have to be a big deal
From our perspective, what’s most important is that you get to the correct amount of tax owed. That’s where good bookkeeping comes into play. If you are a multi-channel seller facing the possibility of receiving multiple 1099-Ks that included different numbers (like sales tax,) it becomes critical to have the order-level details (product price, any discounts, shipping, sales tax collected, fees charged, etc) broken out and properly categorized so that you can sub-total by any or all of them. This way, should anyone come asking, you can produce accurate reports of every total, and even drill down to the specific transactions behind them.
With Seller Ledger, we automatically import order-level details from the top online sales channels, along with banks and credit cards, to help you produce a Schedule C tax report that is accurate for your business. Anyone can try Seller Ledger free for 30-days, no credit card required.