Change the categories of Etsy transactions

While we’ve had this functionality around for a while, a recent customer email reminded us that we can always do a better job explaining how things work.

In this case, an Etsy seller wrote in and asked how she can change the category on Etsy ads from the default of “Commissions & fees” to “Advertising. And she’s not the first customer to ask this.

Fortunately, Seller Ledger makes it quit easy to make that change. Simply go to the Settings tab and click the “Customize” sub-tab. If will bring you to a screen that looks like this:

You’ll notice that there are a lot of different Etsy fees, including:

  • Generic fees
  • Listing fees
  • Prolist fees
  • Renew fees
  • Renew expired fees
  • Renew sold auto fees
  • Renew sold fees
  • Renew auto expired fees
  • Payment processing fees
  • Offsite ads fees
  • Transaction fees
  • Shipping transaction fees
  • Shipping label insurance fees

If, as our customer was asking, you wanted to categorize Offsite ad fees as “Advertising”, just click on the edit/pencil icon on the far right to be given this screen:

Then just change the category to “Advertising”, click the “Save” button and you’re all set. Seller Ledger will treat all of these transactions as “Advertising.” This applies not only to all future transactions, but all prior transactions.

What about regular Etsy Ads?

Unfortunately, Etsy does not make the fees for their “on site” ads available through their API. Learn how to handle them here.

Pro tip

You may wish to group some of these Etsy fees into more granular categories. For that, we recommend creating sub-categories, and then mapping these details fees to those sub-categories.

Automate your Whatnot accounting with updated Seller Ledger integration

When we first launched our Whatnot integration, the only sales data available to Whatnot sellers was their Ledger history. Customers could download those reports and then upload the CSV-formatted files to Seller Ledger. Since then, Whatnot has added weekly order reports, which provides much more transaction detail, including:

  • Item prices
  • Coupon costs
  • Shipping costs
  • Commission fees
  • Payment processing fees

To take advantage of that, Seller Ledger has rolled out new functionality to automate Whatnot accounting. Customers no longer need to download files from Whatnot and upload them to Seller Ledger. All of that is taken care of.

How to automate your Whatnot accounting

In order to fully automate your Whatnot account within Seller Ledger, you only need two things:

1. You should use the Chrome browser when accessing Seller Ledger so that you can also make use of the second tool (below.)

2. Once you are using Chrome, you will want to install Seller Ledger’s custom-built Browser Extension. This extension allows Seller Ledger to automatically pull down and import the proper transaction details.

You can learn more on how to get set up properly in this support article.

Once you are properly set up, Seller Ledger will regularly access your Whatnot account, retrieve the order, coupon, shipping and fee information.

New Walmart Channel summary page

Continuing the work with did for both Amazon and eBay, we’ve just rolled out a new channel summary page for Walmart. While Seller Ledger has been importing Walmart sales, refunds and fees for more than a year now, we’ve made it even easier to make sense of all of that detailed data.

From your Seller Ledger dashboard, just click into your Walmart account to view a screen like the following:

Walmart summary

You can choose from a number of date ranges to see your data. You can click into any payout to view a summary of (and mini profit and loss statement for) that payout. You can even drill down to see every single transaction that makes up each payout.

You can also see a summary of your sales and expenses for the period, with a breakdown among selling costs.

Want help automating your Walmart accounting? Learn more about how Seller Ledger can help.

Closing entries

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 businesses 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.

How to I record closing entries?

If you click on the Settings tab, you will see a new sub-tab for “Journal Entries.” This is has been updated since we first rolled out support for journal entries.

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.

Attach receipts to your transactions

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!

Reconcile Amazon payouts to bank deposits

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.

If you haven’t yet tried to automate your Amazon accounting with Seller Ledger, now might be a good time to try. No 3rd party connectors needed.

New Amazon Channel summary page

As we did earlier this summary 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:

amazon channel summary

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 amount to your end of year tax form, this new view should help you get a better sense of all of Amazon financial data.

Want help automating your Amazon accounting? Learn more about how Seller Ledger can help.

Track sales from any Marketplace

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 categories 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 work:

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.

Step 2: Create a new account in Seller Ledger

Follow the steps in our prior blog post to create a new account to track the sales from your marketplace. Name the new account whatever you want (though it’s probably a good idea to include the name of the marketplace in your account name.)

Step 3. Reformat the transaction history file

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.

Upload manual sales

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.

Track Off-site and Cash Sales

While we pride ourselves on providing the most automated accounting solution for eCommerce sellers, there will always be circumstances where a seller conducts business in person, or on a platform what 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 create/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 and, if you scroll to the bottom of the next screen, you’ll 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.

Step 2: Add your order details

Click into your newly created account from your Dashboard, and 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 us 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.

Give it a try

Whether it’s cash-sales or other non-connected platforms, you can now get a complete view of your eCommerce business finances. Seller Ledger offers everyone a 30-day free trial, with no credit card required. Sign up and see for yourself how easy it is to get your finances in order.

Hide older accounts from your dashboard

As part of our recent rollout of expanded support for balance sheet accounts, we’ve also made it possible to hide old connected accounts from the dashboard.

For those users who may have switched bank accounts, or had new credit cards issued, you likely want to keep all of the transaction history in those accounts (deleting the account would delete all of the transactions as well,) but may no longer wish to see them listed on your dashboard. Changing that is now simple.

Just go to Settings -> Accounts, where you will see the list of all of your balance sheet accounts.

Balance sheet accounts

Click the edit/pencil to the far right of the account you’d like to hide and you will see a checkbox to “Show on dashboard.”

Simply uncheck that box and click the Save button. That’s it. Your account, and all of it’s underlying transactions, will remain in Seller Ledger, but you won’t see it listed on your dashboard any more.