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.
Seller Ledger is very pleased to announce the release of new functionality to help you track the gross margin in your eCommerce business.
What is Gross Margin and why is it important?
Gross margin, to put it simply, is how much profit you make on top the cost to create or acquire your products. This is before deducting other expenses needed to run your business. And it’s defined as a percentage of your overall revenue.
To use a super simple example:
It costs you $6 to make or buy something you intend to sell
You are able to sell that item for $10.
Your gross profit on that order would be $4, which would equate to a gross margin of 40%.
As for why gross margin is an important number to watch, let’s just say that it’s the starting point for any successful eCommerce business. If you aren’t making enough profit on each and every item you sell, you won’t be able to cover the additional expenses to run your business.
For a more in-depth explanation, and some benchmarks on what a “good” gross margin looks like, check out this overview of eCommerce gross margin.
How do I find my gross margin?
Seller Ledger’s gross margin functionality only works for customers who are tracking costs on a per-item basis. You don’t need to track every single item cost, but the more you do, the more accurate your gross margin calculation will be.
If you click into the Inventory -> Sold view, you will now see a summary at the top of the screen that shows you the gross margin value and the percentage of transactions on which it’s based. To increase that percentage, you can enter more cost information for more orders.
In addition, there is a new dashboard tile that shows your gross margin for the current month. We have replaced the old “Cost of Goods” tile for inventory trackers, as this new information contains more detail – not only how much cost information you’ve entered, but also how much profit you’re generating.
Stay tuned for more updates in this direction, as we continue to look for ways to provide more insight into your business.
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]
