Don’t miss out on your deductions. Just tell Seller Ledger the date of the trip, a description of its purpose, and the distance traveled – we’ll calculate the rest. And remember, not only can you track your trips one at a time, but you can now also upload a CSV file of all of your trips – a pretty good option if you’re making lots of trips to the post office.
Ready to automate your eCommerce bookkeeping?
Join thousands of sellers who save hours every month with Seller Ledger.
To better support accounting pros and some of our bigger customers who use more traditional double entry accounting, we are pleased to announce the ability to record year-end closing entries within Seller Ledger.
What are closing entries?
In essence, closing entries “reset” a business’s profit and loss each year. Think of the profit and loss report as a scoreboard, showing you how much money you made (or lost) in a year. When a new year starts, your profit and loss starts all over. But, you don’t want to lose track of the prior year scores. That’s where closing entries come in. These entries take the profit and loss amounts and move them to the balance sheet.
Click the button to “Add Closing Entry. You will then see a pop-up asking which year you would like to close.
Click “Review and Confirm” and you will be presented with the complete profit & loss for that year, as well as the net profit or loss that will be transferred to retained earnings.
Click the button to “Create Closing Entry” and Seller Ledger does the rest of the work for you. Your Profit and Loss will be reset for the next year, and your balance sheet will be updated to reflect the change to retained earnings.
Ready to automate your eCommerce bookkeeping?
Join thousands of sellers who save hours every month with Seller Ledger.
To help eCommerce sellers stay more organized, we are pleased to announce that Seller Ledger now supports the ability to attach receipts to transactions. And we do it in a couple of ways.
Start with just your receipt
Do you have a cash purchase that you need to put into Seller Ledger? Take a picture of the receipt and upload it first. Seller Ledger, using some AI magic, will try to parse the image. We also support other file formats.
In this example, go to the Expenses tab and click the “Add Expense” button:
Then, click the option to “Choose File” and select the receipt file from your hard drive.
After choosing the file, Seller Ledger will extract as much information as possible and pre-populate the fields below. In this case, it got the date and amount correct, but I had to edit the Vendor and Description.
Click the save button and your new expense is recorded, with a copy of the receipt that you can view at any time by clicking on it.
Attach a receipt to an existing transaction
You can also upload a receipt to an existing transaction that has been imported into Seller Ledger. Just click into your bank or credit card account and you’ll see a new paperclip icon to the far right of the transaction.
Clicking the paperclip icon pops up a simple dialog box:
Find the image or file of your receipt and click Done. In your transaction list, you will now see the icon has changed to a small receipt, which you can click on to preview the file you just uploaded.
As always, we want to thank all of the customers who wrote in suggesting this feature. Keep ’em coming!
Ready to automate your eCommerce bookkeeping?
Join thousands of sellers who save hours every month with Seller Ledger.
If you are trying to tackle eCommerce accounting, you know how critical it is to be able to reconcile marketplace sales and expenses to the payouts that hit your bank account. Well, just like we previously did for eBay, we are pleased to announce the ability to drill into any Amazon payout to see the precise data that makes up that payout amount.
When you click into your Amazon account from your Seller Ledger dashboard and review your transactions, you have likely seen your payouts listed with an “>>expand” link next to them:
When you click expand, you’ll see some important additional information. Not only do we show the bank account details that the transfer was made to, but we show the summary totals by category.
And if that’s not enough, we also provide a button to be able to drill down and see EXACTLY which transactions make up that payout.
And as a reminder, if you link Seller Ledger to the bank account where those payouts get deposited, we will automatically match the payouts from your Amazon account to the deposit in that bank account.
This means you can look at any Amazon payout deposit and drill all the way back down to see the transactions that are included.
As we did earlier this summer for eBay, we’ve now rolled out a new channel summary page for Amazon as well. While Seller Ledger has been able to import all of your Amazon sales, refunds and fees for a while, now it’s even easier to make sense of all of that detailed data.
Now, when you click into your Amazon account from your Seller Ledger dashboard, you’ll see a screen like the following:
Drill down on any payout to see the totals for each payout including every single transaction that’s included in that payout.
Amazon has a large number of transaction types, especially their fees. While Seller Ledger focuses primarily on rolling up all of those amounts to your end-of-year tax form, this new view should help you get a better sense of all of Amazon’s financial data.
While most of the major eCommerce marketplaces, like Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and Etsy have robust APIs that make it possible for us to automatically import and categorize their transactions, a lot of newer and smaller marketplaces haven’t made that investment.
For some of the more popular ones, like Whatnot, Poshmark, Mercari and Depop, we’ve built a custom import tool for the transactions that they allow you to export. And we continue to evaluate other marketplaces.
But, in the meantime, we’ve recently rolled out the ability to track sales from any marketplace. You can now import order history from any online platform, so long as you can modify their transaction files to match our format. Here’s how it works:
Step 1: Download your transaction history in CSV format
Log into your marketplace and find the place to access your order/transaction history. The more detailed the report, the better. Then, download it in a CSV (comma-separated) format – a very common format for exporting data.
To upload a file with order and refund details, Seller Ledger expects the following fields:
Required:
Order Date
Order ID
Customer Name
Product Name
Quantity
Unit Price
Ship To State
Ship To Zip
Ship To Country
Optional:
SKU
Shipping
Tax
Ship To Address
Ship To City
In fact, it may be easier to simply use our sample format file, which we provide here.
Step 4: Upload the new file to Seller Ledger
Click into your newly created marketplace account from the dashboard and click the “Upload history” tab.
You’ll want to choose the “Upload orders” option on the left. Click the “Choose File” button, select the reformatted file you just created, and click Save. Seller Ledger will begin importing your order history, complete with any product, fee and refund details that are provided.
Ready to automate your eCommerce bookkeeping?
Join thousands of sellers who save hours every month with Seller Ledger.
Sometimes you may find yourself with inventory that isn’t selling, so you think about donating it in the hopes of writing it off. The question is – can you write off inventory donations? And if so, how?
The good news and the bad news
The good news is: yes, you are permitted to donate unsold inventory. According to the IRS:
How much you can deduct
“the amount you can deduct is the smaller of its FMV on the day you contributed it or its basis”
FMV means “fair market value”, as in, what you could sell the item for. And basis is your full loaded cost for that item.
The bad news, at least for Schedule-C filers, is that you do not get to just write the donations off as part of cost of goods sold. From that same IRS publication:
How to classify donations
“You must remove the amount of your charitable contribution deduction from your opening inventory. It isn’t part of the cost of goods sold.”
What this is basically saying is that, instead of adding those donated items to your cost of goods sold total, you need to remove them from your inventory, then deduct the value of those items on Schedule A of your personal tax return.
Handling Inventory Donations in Seller Ledger
Fortunately, Seller Ledger allows you to remove donated items from inventory. When you click “Remove stock”, simply choose the “Remove for personal use” option.
This removes those items from your inventory without adding them to cost of goods sold. Instead, they will be treated as a “Not for business” expense.
Ready to automate your eCommerce bookkeeping?
Join thousands of sellers who save hours every month with Seller Ledger.
We pride ourselves on providing the most automated accounting solution for eCommerce sellers. However, there will always be circumstances where a seller conducts business in person, or on a platform that doesn’t offer much in the way of connectivity.
For those cases, we’ve rolled out improved order history tracking for off-site and cash sales.
Step 1: Create an account to track those off-site or cash sales
We just rolled out the ability to add a new type of asset account that you can use to track these sales. From your dashboard, click the “Add Channels, Banks and Accounts” button. Then, scroll to the bottom of the next screen to see the following option:
This can be a “Cash” account, or an account to track sales from other online marketplaces like Facebook Marketplace, TCGplayer, StockX and more. Just name your account and you’re off to the races.
TCGplayer accounting is now automated
Since the release of this manual asset account feature, Seller Ledger has released a direct integration with TCGplayer. Check out more in this blog post.
Step 2: Add your order details
Click into your newly created account from your Dashboard. You’ll see a new button called “Add order” in the upper right:
Clicking on that button will bring up a much more detailed transactions screen that not only lets you enter the regular information like date, customer, and amount, but will also let you record the item(s) that you sold:
If you scroll down, you will also see that we allow you to enter additional information about each order, including:
Any shipping you may have collected from the buyer
Any sales tax you may have collected (or had collected for you)
Any fees that may have been incurred (for example, by a non-connected marketplace that this order sold through)
Any shipping labels or other shipping costs you had to pay
If a part of this order was donated to charity
As a reminder, the more details you can record that are tied to an order, the better able Seller Ledger is to tell you the EXACT net profit you make on every sale.
And as a reminder, you can always use the regular “Add transaction” button to record things like payouts (remember – they are transfers), non-order fees, etc.
Want more step-by-step guidance?
If you’re having trouble figuring out how to enter data from certain non-connected marketplaces, just email us a copy of one or more of their reports (or screens) to [email protected] and we’d be happy to help.
Ready to automate your eCommerce bookkeeping?
Join thousands of sellers who save hours every month with Seller Ledger.
Recently, we wrote about how folks who source on eBay can track their purchases in Seller Ledger. Well, we’ve also heard that more and more resellers are sourcing from Whatnot, a fast-growing live-streaming sales platform. We already make it possible to import your Whatnot sales into Seller Ledger, but today, we’ll show you how to create inventory from your purchase history.
Step 1: Get your Whatnot purchase history in the right format
First, you’re going to want to download your Whatnot orders report for a given period of time. It will come in a CSV file format that, when you open it in a spreadsheet, will look something like this:
The good news, because it’s already in a CSV file format, you only need to make a few changes and it will upload to Seller Ledger just fine.
Step 2: Remove and rename columns
The vast majority of the columns in this file won’t be needed for uploading inventory. You can simply delete the following columns, which are not supported by our inventory upload feature
order id
order numeric id
buyer
seller
product description
product category
processed date
order status
order style
order currency
sold price
subtotal
shipping price
taxes
taxes currency
credits applied
Inbound cost of goods sold
Note: because the “total amount” column amount includes the inbound “shipping price” and “taxes” amounts, that “total amount” will be properly divided among the quantity of the items and be included in the item costs.
Keep the “product name” column header as is, as well as the header for “quantity.” But rename “total amount” column header to “total cost” to match the column headers we require.
Step 3: Create unique SKUs for each product
The most important step now is to add a new column, titled “sku” and to create unique SKUs for each item in this file. Then, when you list them on various platforms to sell (and include the corresponding SKU value,) Seller Ledger can tie the sale back to the original cost, reduce your inventory and properly calculate cost of goods sold.
Step 4: Upload your inventory to Seller Ledger
Lastly, to load this cost information into Seller Ledger, just go to the Inventory tab and click the “Add Inventory” button. Record the date that you are uploading this information, “Whatnot” as “Purchased from” and enter the total amount of all of the items (which you can add up in the spreadsheet). Then click the button near the bottom of the screen that says “Upload inventory”, choose the file, and click save. Within a few minutes, it should show as a single large purchase of items with all of the cost details broken down.
Don’t track inventory in Seller Ledger? That’s ok too
We recently rolled out the ability to upload generic expenses in a CSV file format, which can include COGS purchases from other platforms. Learn more about how to do that here.
That’s it. Happy sourcing on Whatnot. May your profit be ever increasing.
Ready to automate your eCommerce bookkeeping?
Join thousands of sellers who save hours every month with Seller Ledger.
In an effort to help sellers avoid stock outs, we just released a new version of the Inventory -> Stock page.
We’ve added a couple of new features to help avoid stock outs by making it easier to track out-of-stock inventory. They will also help with re-ordering and inventory analysis.
For one, you can now filter by stock levels, including items that are out of stock, and those that are at a low stock level (below 10 units).
Plus, you can now sort your inventory by any of the columns.
