Do you ever sell an item before you’ve acquired the inventory? How do you account for that? Seller Ledger has a new setting to allow that.
By default, when Seller Ledger attempts to match inventory cost information with a sale, we assume that the sold item was purchased before the date of sale. However, based on feedback from a few customers, we have heard of the need to be able to support purchases that are made after an item has already sold.
Click the edit (pencil) icon under “Orders to Purchase Date Matching” and you’ll be presented with this dialog box:
Choose the second option to also allow matching to “future” purchases and voila – Seller Ledger will now let you match to purchases made after the sale.
In an effort to make it even easier to prepare for 2023 taxes, Seller Ledger has rolled out a few small enhancements.
View sales that have no cost information
For those of you tracking inventory at the item level, we’ve made it a bit easier to identify any remaining sales for which you haven’t yet entered cost information. In the Inventory -> Sold view, there is a new filter to allow you to select sales where cost information is missing:
View “in-stock” inventory totals
At the top of the Inventory -> In Stock view, we now show you the total count and cost of all of your unsold inventory:
Mileage totals
At the top of the Expenses -> Mileage view, you can now see both the total number of miles driven, and the total mileage expenses to deduct. In addition, we’ve added date range selectors so you can choose different periods to review:
While these aren’t the largest changes, they do reflect customer feedback about small ways to make the product a bit easier to use, which in turn, makes accounting and taxes less of a pain. Please keep sending us feedback at [email protected].
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 to expand
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 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].
