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.
As part of our efforts to further research interesting 1099-K scenarios, we wanted to explore a question that many resellers have recently asked about: consignment sales.
What are consignment sales?
A consignment sale happens when a reseller (called the consignee) helps another individual or business (called the consignor) sell some of their products for them. Usually, the owner of the products (consignor) compensates the reseller (consignee) by paying a percentage of the total sale, a flat fee, or some other negotiated rate.
Conceptually, this arrangement is pretty straightforward. The issue is: how does the accounting work? And where do 1099-Ks come into play?
Accounting for consignment sales – before 1099-Ks
Traditionally, the way to handle accounting of consignment sales is as follows:
The owner of the item (consignor) tracks the total sale as income, and treats the commission paid to the person selling it on their behalf (consignee) as an expense. The consignee just reports the commission amount as their income. In fact, if the consignor sends the consignee more than $600 in commission payments, there’s a good chance of them sending the consignee a 1099.
Why does the accounting normally work like this? Because ownership of the item (officially referred to as “title”) does not pass from the business to the reseller when consigned. The original owner still has “title” to the item until it sells, at which point it transfers to the buyer. So the sale gets recorded as a sale from the owner (consignor) to the end buyer, and the commission gets paid to the reseller (consignor.)
Let’s look at an example:
A local small business has an armoire, originally purchased for $100, that they would like to sell on consignment. They enlist a reseller, who agrees to sell the item in exchange for a 20% commission. That reseller successfully sells the armoire for $300. Ignoring things like shipping costs and fees, the resulting accounting entries would look this:
Owner/Consignor:
Product sales: $300
- Cost of Goods Sold: $100
- Commission: $60 (paid to Reseller/Consignee)
===========================
= Net profit: $140
Reseller/Consignee:
Commission income: $60 (received from Owner/Consignor)
===========================
Net profit: $60
This, however, raises an interesting question: if the consignee is collecting the money for the sale, how do they only report $60 of income?
Now you start to see why this is confusing in the world of eCommerce and 1099-Ks. We won’t get too far into the details (unless enough people ask,) but the key concept is that, as a consignee, when you collect the money from a consignment sale, that money doesn’t get counted as your revenue. It’s actually a liability. You owe it to the consignor (less any commission and agreed-upon costs) as soon as you collect it. Only the commission is income.
And herein lies the point of the article. If you are an eCommerce reseller doing consignment sales, the platform you are selling on knows nothing about consignment. They will send you a 1099-K that includes the total sales proceeds. In the above case, that would be the full $300.
So what should you do?
Accounting for consignment sales – matching 1099-Ks
Disclaimer
Before proceeding it’s important to mention that we at Seller Ledger are not tax experts and are not trying to provide tax advice. It is critical that you as a reader make your own decisions on how to handle your specific tax situation, which may include hiring a professional.
First, the fact that 1099-Ks from a platform like eBay do not exactly match your sales records is okay. The 1099-K is an informational form. The IRS knows that it may not represent a business’s true income. Therefore, accurate bookkeeping is critical.
When the sale shows up from your online sales channel, you can go ahead and categorize it as product sales, and when you make your payment to the original owner/consignor for the net amount minus your commission, make sure to categorize that properly.
“Do not include merchandise you receive on consignment in your inventory. Include your profit or commission on merchandise consigned to you in your income when you sell the merchandise or when you receive your profit or commission, depending upon the method of accounting you use.”
Mark Tew, of NotYourDadsCPA, suggests using “Commissions” in this video, which we think makes a lot of sense.
Using the same scenario as above, this would result in entries that look like this:
Reseller/Consignee:
Product sales: $300
- Commissions: $240 (paid to the Owner/Consignor)
===========================
= Net profit: $60
Owner/Consignor:
Product sales: $240 (received from Reseller/Consignee)
- Cost of Goods Sold: $100
===========================
= Net profit: $140
Note that each party’s net profit is still the same – the accounting entries are just a bit different. As a reseller, what matters most is that your bottom line profit accurately reflects the business that you did. And taking this approach will help your top-line numbers match the 1099-Ks that get reported for your business.
Simplify your bookkeeping
At Seller Ledger, we import the individual order details of everything you sell through your online sales channels, making it easy to spot those consignment sales and categorize the payouts to consignors properly. Once you have categorized an expense with a consignor, Seller Ledger’s software can remember this for you so all future sales expenses with that consignor can be treated the same way. Anyone is welcome to try Seller Ledger for 30 days, free of charge with no credit card required.
To help track consignment agreements and payouts, we have launched a new, free extension to the Seller Ledger application at consign.sellerledger.com. Seller Ledger customers who sell on consignment can now track how much they owe in consignment commissions by identifying which eCommerce sales belong to which consignor. Help us perfect this important customer need – check it out now.
By now, most small eCommerce sellers are aware that the annual sales threshold for receiving a 1099-K from online payment platforms is dropping to $600. There is a lot of content out there about what is included in the 1099-K amount, how that can vary from one platform to the next, and ways to make sure you’re capturing the right deductions.
But a very interesting question that we’ve heard from customers is: how do you handle sales of personal items?
When most new sellers are getting started, they begin by listing some (or many) personal items. It’s a great way to learn the ropes. Over time, they start making their own products for sale or sourcing items for resale from other places. But there’s still a good chance that, even among sellers who have been doing this for years, some personal items are bound to get listed.
Personal vs Business items
The most important difference between selling personal items versus those you’ve purchased for the purposes of resale is this: you cannot claim a loss on the sale of personal items.
The IRS is happy to tax the profit on both personal and business items, but you can only declare a loss on items you specifically built or purchased with the intent to resell (e.g. your inventory.) Items used for personal reasons, even if they are sold for less than the amount you originally paid, do not create a loss.
Let’s talk about a few examples:
Personal item sold for a profit
You have a copy of a now out-of-print vinyl album that you bought WAY back in the day for maybe $10. After listening to it a few times, you socked it away and didn’t think much about it. However, you one day discover it’s a bit of a collectors item, so sell it online for $17.50. In this case, you would owe tax on the $7.50 in profit.
Revenue: $17.50
Cost of goods sold: $10.00
Profit: $7.50
Business item sold for a profit
Let’s take that same scenario, but instead say you found an out-of-print vinyl record at a yard sale for $10. You also sold it for $17.50. The scenario would be identical:
Revenue: $17.50
Cost of goods sold: $10.00
Profit: $7.50
Business item sold for a loss
Now let’s say, in your sourcing, you find another out-of-print vinyl album that costs $10 and are sure you can sell it for a profit. But when the time comes, you can’t get more than $5 for it. So, you take your $5 and call it a day. Here, the scenario would differ:
Revenue: $5.00
Cost of goods sold: $10.00
Loss: $5.00
Because you purchased that album with the intent to resell it, and didn’t use it for personal enjoyment, you can write off that loss against other profitable sales.
Personal item sold for a loss
Going back to that original example, let’s say that that old vinyl record you only listened to a few times turned out to be worth only $5. You take the money and free up some space in the house. Now, you might think that accounting for it might be the same as the preceding example – but that would be incorrect.
Revenue: $5.00
Cost of goods sold: $10.00?
Loss: NOT ALLOWED
The IRS states very clearly, in it’s Understanding your 1099-K guidance: “A loss on the sale of a personal item isn’t deductible.”
Ok, so what should you do?
Disclaimer
Before proceeding it’s important to mention that we at Seller Ledger are not tax experts and are not trying to provide tax advice. It is critical that you as a reader make your own decisions on how to handle your specific tax situation, which may include hiring a professional.
Calculating the cost of personal items sold at a loss
They also describe how you could file these amounts as a $0.00 capital gain on Form 8949.
Notice that neither option mentions Schedule C. This is a big part of why this all gets so confusing. These examples provided by the IRS assume that your 1099-K came ONLY from the sale of personal items. But, more commonly for online sellers, the sale of personal items is just a small part of their broader business inventory sales. So how should you file?
Form options and their bookkeeping requirements
Option 1: Track the personal item sales separately and include them on Schedule 1 (or Form 8949) of your 1040.
If you want to follow the IRS instructions precisely, you can track the sale of your personal items separately. However, this will require additional record keeping effort, and could result in amounts that don’t match the 1099-K totals received.
Option 2: Include the sale of personal items in your Schedule C
This option likely keeps the 1099-K totals consistent, and requires less record keeping complexity, but you will need to make sure to identify those personal item sales and make sure the cost is “up to but not more than the proceeds amount“
There may be other options available to you, so it’s important to talk with a tax professional about your desired choice.
How Seller Ledger can make this easier
Now, not to persuade you one way or another, but Seller Ledger actually makes Option 2 above pretty easy.
As part of our rollout of support for inventory and cost of goods tracking earlier this year, we introduced a view of your Sold items that allows you to enter the cost information even after an item has sold. While this provides the opportunity to match that sale to prior inventory purchases, it also allows you to enter items that were never in your business inventory. For example, personal items that you sold. And since we show you the item subtotal right there (what that item sold for,) you can just add your personal item and enter the subtotal amount as the cost. When you click save, your “Gross profit” on that item will show $0.00 – just like in the IRS guidance.
Click “Add costs” from the Sold view:
Enter the cost for that item that matches the Item Subtotal
See your Gross Profit show $0.00.
If you want help automating your eCommerce bookkeeping, we do offer a free 30-day trial, no credit card required. We automatically import your sales and expense history from Amazon, eBay, Etsy and Poshmark, as well as bank and credit card transactions.
We are proud to announce that Seller Ledger now connects directly with your Amazon Seller Central account to help automate much of your Amazon business accounting. As with eBay and Etsy, you can link your Amazon Seller Central account to Seller Ledger and we’ll regularly import your sales and expenses and automatically categorize them for you. Just log into your dashboard and click the “Add Account” button to link your Amazon account.
Also, like with eBay and Etsy, you can always change how you’d like to see your Amazon information categorized by customizing your settings.
Thanks again to the customers who helped us in testing this new integration. Amazon did limit the number of people we could link during the beta period, so we may yet see some new transaction types. If this happens, you may see your Amazon import pause, and we’ll be notified on the back-end to add support for the new transaction type.
Amazon has also listed us in their Selling Partner Appstore, where customers are able to learn more about the product and leave reviews. We’re big fans of customer word of mouth, so if you have an opinion about Seller Ledger and would be willing to share it with other prospective customers, please do.
Next up:
We’re actively working on a Mercari import solution (similar to what we recently announced with Poshmark) and the ability to upload CSV files for poorly or unsupported banks. If you would be interested in beta testing either of these features, please email us at [email protected].
So often we find ourselves in the springtime questioning why didn’t we do more to prepare, and tax season ends up being a time-pressured, stressful undertaking. It doesn’t have to be that way though, as there are many things you can do now to make the process much easier after the end of the calendar year.
1. Ensure you have a consistent means of tracking your finances, including both your sales and expenses, every month.
There are many different ways to do this, and you should select the method that is right for you. Some sellers track these manually in a spreadsheet and others use automated bookkeeping software such as Seller Ledger to make the process faster and easier with automated imports from sales channels and bank/credit card accounts. The key is to ensure you are tracking every sale and every expense, and it’s a good idea to summarize this data monthly to see how your business is doing.
2. Learn about the changes coming for 1099K regulations in 2023.
In 2022, the IRS had planned to require sales channels like eBay, Amazon, and Etsy to issue a 1099K to anyone selling over $600 (vs $20,000 previously), only to announce at the last minute that the change would be delayed to 2023. Many organizations continue to lobby for a higher dollar threshold, but as of the time of this article, the IRS states that it will require 1099K forms for anyone selling $600 or higher in 2023. Note that different companies may calculate their 1099K’s differently and you’ll want to be aware of how they do it.
3. Develop your strategy to know how much inventory you have on hand.
There are many ways to manage inventory. Some sellers count their inventory monthly, quarterly or annually to assess its value, and this is ideal, but it is too huge a task for others. It’s important to document the purchase price of your items when you buy them so you know how much you’ve spent on Inventory. You can do this in a spreadsheet, or Seller Ledger makes it easy to categorize inventory purchased through your connected bank/credit card accounts. When an item sells and you ship it off, the value of your inventory goes down by the value of that item, and that amount becomes Cost of Goods Sold for your taxes. Seller Ledger can manage this process automatically for you so you’ll always know how much inventory you have on hand and you’ll know your Cost of Goods Sold amount for tax time.
4. Make sure you are tracking things like mileage expenses and home office expenses so you’ll remember to include these in your 2023 tax filing.
Every time you drive to a store to purchase inventory, or drive to the post office to ship products, you are using your vehicle for your business. You can either deduct vehicle expenses individually (such as buying a business vehicle, or car insurance), or you can use the mileage deduction every time you take a trip on behalf of the business. If you’re using Seller Ledger, you can just enter the number of miles you traveled for work and Seller Ledger automatically uses the IRS standard mileage rates to track the expense for you. Your home office and things like your storage spaces are deductible too. Make a list of all the areas in your home that are dedicated to your business and you’ll have it handy when needed for taxes.
5. Consider investing in accounting/bookkeeping software that can automate much of this process for your business.
Seller Ledger currently supports eBay, Etsy, Poshmark (through CSV uploads) and Amazon (in beta) with additional channels coming soon. There is a 30-day free trial and pricing is $10/month for up to 250 transactions/month. There are no additional fees for selling through multiple sales channels or for using advanced features such as inventory management. You can connect your sales channels as well as Paypal and your bank and credit card accounts for automated data imports. Drop down menus make it easy to categorize expenses. Monthly, quarterly and annual financial reports help you to understand how your business is performing, and make it easy to prepare for estimated quarterly tax payments. For annual taxes, a pre- populated schedule C form is prepared for you.
If you’re going to begin using an automated software platform, the sooner you start on it the better. Some banks have limitations on how far back they’ll allow you to go in directly importing transactions (many restrict it to 90 days), so to capture the most data possible, don’t wait before signing up. You can start your free 30-day trial at SellerLedger.com.
Today Seller Ledger has launched the ability to import your order and fee information from Poshmark.
Unlike sales channels such as eBay, Etsy and Amazon, Poshmark does not have a public API to which Seller Ledger can automatically connect. But fear not, for they do provide downloadable files (in .csv format) with your sales history. And Seller Ledger’s new import tool makes it super easy to get all of your information from Poshmark into Seller Ledger.
When you click the “Add account” button under Connected Accounts on your dashboard, you will now see an option to “Import Poshmark.”
After clicking the Poshmark button, enter a name for your new account and click “Create Account”
Step 3: Upload your Poshmark sales history file
Once you’ve created your new Poshmark account, you’ll see it among your list of connected accounts on the Dashboard. Note the new icons we’ve added to differentiate between accounts that automatically connect and those that require CSV files be uploaded.
Clicking into the balance shown for your new Poshmark account and click the “Import History” tab. Here you will see the option to upload a CSV file. Choose the file you downloaded from Poshmark and click “Save.” Your file will be uploaded and your transaction history will be imported into Seller Ledger.
Trial users
Step 4: Categorize your Poshmark payouts properly
If you have connected a bank account to Seller Ledger, there’s a good chance your Poshmark 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: Automate your inventory and cost of goods sold
One of the more powerful things about the Poshmark platform is that they let you enter SKU information for each item you sell. And, if you do so, they provide that information in their sale history file when you download it. This allows Seller Ledger to automatically update your inventory levels, calculate cost of goods sold, and per-item profit as soon as you upload your file. Not familiar with how this all works? Check out our video on inventory management through Seller Ledger.
Wrapping up
While a bit more effort than our fully connected accounts, uploading CSV transaction history doesn’t take a lot of additional effort and provides the vast majority of the benefits that are available through Seller Ledger. Just make sure to come back every once in a while to upload your latest sales history.
Plus, 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.
Poshmark is just the first sales channel for whom we’ve built CSV-based functionality. But it’s pretty easy to extend to other channels (like Mercari, which is coming soon.) 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.
We recently received a question about whether sales tax should be included when calculating cost of goods sold. Because this is a very common scenario, we decided that this would make an interesting blog topic.
There are actually a couple of key questions here:
When you buy items for resale, what gets included in Cost of Goods?
If you buy multiple different items in a single transaction, how do you allocate any sales tax, shipping or other extra costs across those items?
What is included in Cost of Goods?
When you purchase items for resale, all of the direct costs you incur should be included in Cost of Goods. This can include the following:
Sales tax
Shipping costs (to deliver the items to you)
Extra fees (e.g. extra charges for paying by credit card)
Handling fees
So, if you buy an item for $100 and get charged $7.75 in sales tax, your Cost of Goods for that item should be $107.75.
How do I handle extra costs for purchases of multiple items?
The same rules apply in terms of including sales tax, shipping and other fees. However, when these extra costs apply to multiple different products, you need to allocate them based on the relative values.
Let’s take a look at an example. Imagine you have a receipt that looks something like this:
You spent $309.60 to acquire 600 items (500 of Widget 1 and 100 of Widget 2.) But the items themselves only cost $250. So what do you do with the other $59.60? Here, a little math is involved. Take the amount spent on the first item (Widget 1: $200) and divide it by the total spent on all items ($250.) Widget 1 represents 80% of your item costs. As such, Widget 1 should have 80% of the sales tax and shipping costs allocated to it. So, multiply the $59.60 in extra costs by 80%, and you’ll get $47.68 in extra costs that should apply to Widget 1. The remaining $11.92 in extra costs should be allocated to Widget 2.
The net result of these allocations gives you total Cost of Goods of:
Widget 1: $247.68 (for 500 items) or a per-item cost of $0.50
Widget 2: $61.92 (for 100 items) or a per-item cost of $0.62
You may notice there’s a potential rounding issue here, which we’ll address in a future blog post. Stay tuned:)
In Seller Ledger, once you categorize the purchase of $309.60 as “Inventory”, you might see a screen like this:
Just click “Add Details” and enter your newly allocated cost information like this:
Please note: this is only possible if you’re choosing to use item-level tracking in Seller Ledger. You can learn more about it by reading our support article.
We also have it on our list to automatically allocate costs based on the underlying receipt, so stay tuned for that too.
In summary – yes, sales tax, shipping and other fees should be included in Cost of Goods Sold. Hopefully this makes the subject a bit easier to understand.
As always, we’d love to hear any feedback you might have on the product, as well as any other critical questions you have about eCommerce accounting, bookkeeping, inventory and Cost of Goods Sold. Please reach out to us at [email protected].
In time for 2023 third quarter estimated taxes, Seller Ledger has released a new feature to make calculating your tax obligation easy.
New “Quarterly” taxes tab
Under the Taxes section, you will see a new tab labeled “Quarterly”. Clicking on it will bring you to a screen like this:
Quarterly Estimated Taxes
Seller Ledger now estimates your quarterly tax payments based on your year-to-date business results and shows you the correct payment deadlines for the selected year. We take care of the rates for Social Security and Medicare, and let you choose the federal income tax rate that applies to your situation (see the new “Business” tab under Settings:)
Set your income tax rate
If you under- or over-pay for one quarter, Seller Ledger will remember that for future quarters. To record payments, just use the new “Estimated tax” category that has been added to your account, so Seller Ledger knows to apply the payment correctly.
