To help our multi-channel sellers compare metrics across sales channels, we have just released (in open beta,) a new “Channel Breakdown” report. Now you can see your sales and expenses by channel.
Sales and expense information that we import directly from each channel will show up in the proper categories. And don’t forget, we allow you to customize how all of those transactions get categorized, by channel.
In the future, we hope to make it easier to add additional channel cost information from other sources, like credit cards.
When we first launched our Poshmark integration, the only option was to download sales history reports in CSV file format and upload them to Seller Ledger. While this provides an accurate view of your Poshmark financial performance, it required ongoing effort on your part to keep your finances up to date.
Fortunately, now users have a more automated choice. By using the Chrome browser and Seller Ledger’s custom-built Browser Extension, Poshmark sellers can now see their sales history import into Seller Ledger on a daily basis. Not only that, but we also now import your payout information (which is not included in the downloadable Sales Reports from Poshmark.)
To learn more about how to automate your Poshmark accounting, view this support article.
The “At a glance” section of the Seller Ledger dashboard hasn’t received a lot attention since we first launched. Based on feedback from customers, we recently added the ability to choose from a few time periods that you can view.
Have you ever logged into Seller Ledger and seen your data at the top of the screen changed to all zeros? Well, that’s because the default view was “This month”, which, on the first of a month, often reverts to zero because we haven’t imported any new transactions yet. It’s even more alarming when you get to January first.
Well, we’ve made a couple of changes to help with that.
First, we now offer a few different time periods to choose from:
As you can see, instead of always being “Month to date”, you can now choose “Prior 30 days” and “Year to date”.
Second, we now default to “Prior 30 days” so that this section is likely to always have data displayed.
While a small change, we hope it helps avoid some confusion and adds value to the customer experience.
In our continued efforts to make Seller Ledger easier to use, we rolled out some improvements to how accounts are linked and displayed on the Dashboard page
The first thing you might notice is that, if you have multiple accounts from the same sales channel or bank, they are now grouped more obviously together:
But the biggest change is the addition of the new “plus” icon within each channel/bank header:
Clicking this icon allows you to quickly add another account from that same bank or sales channel.
To add a new sales channel, or accounts from a new bank or credit card, you would still click the button below your accounts, now more accurately labeled “Add Channels & Banks”
As always, we welcome feedback on our product changes, so feel free to email us at [email protected]
We are excited to announce that Whatnot sellers can now import their “ledger” details into Seller Ledger.
While Whatnot does not yet provide a public API (which means we can’t automatically grab your transaction history like we can with Amazon, eBay, Etsy and Shopify,) they did release the ability to export ledger details in CSV format earlier this spring. We can import these files directly into Seller Ledger, like we do for both Poshmark and Mercari.
Step 1: Download your Whatnot sales history
Go to Seller Hub, under Financials, and then under Ledger – you should see an option to export your history in a CSV formatted file. Go ahead and download and save that file.
Step 2: Add a Whatnot 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 Whatnot.”
After clicking the Whatnot button, enter a name for your new account and click “Create Account”
Step 3: Upload your Whatnot ledger file
Once you’ve created your new Whatnot account, you’ll be taken directly into that new account, to a screen that allows you to upload your Whatnot ledger file. Choose the file you downloaded from Whatnot 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 Whatnot file is.
Step 4: Categorize your Whatnot payouts properly
Whatnot currently pays sellers via Stripe (often to a bank account) and PayPal. If you link your bank or PayPal account to Seller Ledger, you’ll want to make sure that your payouts from Whatnot don’t get double-counted. So, when you see your Whatnot payouts hit your bank or PayPal account, make sure to categorize them as “Transfer: My Whatnot Sales” – or whatever you named your Whatnot account.
Step 5: Remember to regularly update your Whatnot sales in Seller Ledger
Because we can’t pull in your new sales and expense information on a dailybasis, 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 request a new platform or 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.
In our continuing efforts to make eCommerce accounting easier, today we announce a big step forward for inventory tracking.
In short, you can now take a picture of your receipt and upload it to Seller Ledger. We use the latest “artificial intelligence” technology to extract item cost information from the image and pre-populate the inventory purchase form.
To show you exactly what’s possible, here is a picture, taken from an iPhone, of a receipt from a trip to our local Marshall’s store:
Within Seller Ledger, if this purchases came in from a linked bank or credit card, make sure to categorize it as “inventory” and then go to Inventory -> Purchases and click “Add details.” If this was a cash purchase, or from a source not connected to Seller Ledger, just go to this same screen and click the “Add Inventory” button.
You will see a new option at the bottom of the screen to “Upload image or pdf”:
Click the “Upload receipt” button and choose the picture that you took of your receipt (or try the example we’ve posted above.) Seller Ledger will then process the image and extract as much information as possible. In the above example, you will end up with the following:
And scroll down to see the remaining information that we were able to extract from the image…
Notice that we found 4 unique items with descriptions and the correct per-item costs. Not only that, but we were able to recognize the $6.32 in sales tax. And given our recent feature that allocates extra cost of goods amounts, we automatically allocated that $6.32 across the 4 items.
The one piece of work left for you to complete is to either identify or create the unique SKU for each item, which will then allow Seller Ledger to match to sold items, thereby updating inventory and cost of goods amounts automatically when it sells.
To help us improve this feature over time, it helps to get as may customers trying it as possible. Please give it a try and let us know how we can make it better.
When you purchase inventory, there are often other costs besides the cost of the individual items that must be accounted for as part of “cost of goods.” In fact, we wrote a blog post about it a while back.
Until now, deciding how to handle those extra costs was something that customers had to figure out on their own. Well, no more. Now, Seller Ledger allows you to enter those additional costs and we automatically adjust the per-item cost of goods for your inventory.
You will now see a new “Other costs” field at the top of the form for entering inventory purchase details. Enter the total of any extra costs paid, be it sales tax, inbound shipping, processing fees, whatever. Then, as you record the item-level purchase details, you will see the “other costs” amount divvied up among the items, based on the weighted average cost of those items within the overall purchase.
This feature saves you time so you don’t have to attempt any calculations yourself. And it sets us up well to support the next big feature we’re working on: the ability to upload a picture of a receipt and have us create inventory purchase details from it. Stay tuned.
To really understand how to improve your eCommerce business, you should know which items make you the most profit. Seller Ledger recently rolled out summary-level gross margin totals on the dashboard of those sellers who track inventory. Now, we have introduced a new “gross profit” report to show you that same information (and more) on a per-item level.
For each unique item that you sell, we will show you how much total gross profit you make, as well as your average gross margin for those items. You can sort by different columns too. This allows you to see which items make you the most profit for your business. Hopefully, this information can help inform your sourcing strategies going forward.
Better cost tracking = better information
It’s important to realize that this report is only going to be as helpful as the information you’ve entered into Seller Ledger. The more “cost” information you provide about your inventory, the more accurately we can report on your sales and profits.
Pro tip
One of the quickest ways to load inventory cost information into Seller Ledger is to upload it in CSV format. Check out our blog post on how to do just that.
For those of you who may be using the cash-based approach to inventory, or simply tracking at the balance level, this new report won’t be particularly useful. But, in case this might motivate you to track at a more detailed level, feel free to go back and see how Seller Ledger can support you.
Help us further automate inventory costs
We continue to look for ways to reduce the amount of effort required to get what you need out of Seller Ledger. And we understand that tracking inventory is one of the most challenging aspects of running an eCommerce business. As such, we’d love to hear suggestions on ways to improve the ability to get inventory cost information into our platform.
Please email us at [email protected] with your suggestions and we’ll do our best to tackle as many as we can.
Are you thinking of switching from QuickBooks to Seller Ledger but are worried about losing historical data? Well, it turns out that we have started making it easy to take your QuickBooks transaction information and bring it over.
Mileage trips
We just built a simple tool to import all of your QuickBooks mileage history into Seller Ledger. All you need to do is export your trip history in a CSV format. Working with a customer recently, we found that the QuickBooks mileage file contains the following columns:
Date
Type
Trip Purpose
Vehicle
Start Address
End Address
Distance
Deduction
Logging Method
Now, because Seller Ledger is designed for small businesses who file a Schedule C, we don’t require as much information to be tracked. For example, we only care about “Business” trips, so don’t ask for a “Type” value (e.g. Business or Personal.) We also don’t ask you which vehicle you’re using. In fact, we only require the minimum information necessary to calculate your IRS standard mileage deduction:
Trip date
Description
Distance
Seller Ledger knows the right mileage rate based on your trip date, and we let you decide how you wish to calculate the distance drive.
In fact, if you send us a CSV file that includes value for just those 3 columns, we’ll be happy to help upload the data for you.
Is this a feature?
At the moment, we don’t have this functionality as a customer-facing feature within the application. In fact, our customer support team built a simple tool using our recently introduced API (which stands for “application programming interface.) For any technical users who might be interested, we published a step-by-step tutorial on exactly how to build such a tool.
So if your want to switch from QuickBooks to Seller Ledger, and could use help with your mileage information, shoot us an email at [email protected] and we’ll be happy to help.
And stay tuned for future updates on other ways to help you switch:)
Want to know which products sell the most across all of your eCommerce channels? With Seller Ledger’s new “Product Sales” report, you’re just a couple of clicks away. Simply go to the Reports tab and click the “Product Sales” sub-tab and, voila:
Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to work on providing better insight into your eCommerce business. And please keep passing along suggestions on how we can do better.
