Automate Your Mercari Accounting

Mercari customers have been able to upload their sales history into Seller Ledger via CSV files for a while. But we are pleased to announce that you can now further automate your Mercari accounting.

Using the Chrome browser and Seller Ledger’s custom-built Browser Extension, Mercari sellers can now get their sales and fee history imported into Seller Ledger on a nightly basis. Not only that, but we also now import your payout information (which is not included in the downloadable sales reports from Mercari).

Seller Ledger Chrome Extension

How to automate your Mercari accounting

In order to fully automate your Mercari accounting 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.

To learn more about how to automate Mercari accounting, view this support article.

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

Automate Your Depop Accounting

We have had the ability to upload Depop sales history into Seller Ledger for a little while now. However, today we are excited to announce that you can now automate your Depop accounting even further.

Using the Chrome browser and Seller Ledger’s custom-built Browser Extension, Depop sellers can now get their sales and fee history imported into Seller Ledger on a nightly basis.

Seller Ledger Chrome Extension

How to automate your Depop accounting

In order to fully automate your Depop accounting 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.

To learn more about how to automate Depop accounting, view this support article.

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

Better Manage the Products You Sell

To better help you manage the products you sell, Seller Ledger has added a new view under the Inventory tab. In addition, for those of you who are not tracking inventory (i.e. using a “cash-based” approach) and writing off cost of goods sold directly, you’ll notice that the Inventory tab now has more useful features.

Finding your products

Clicking into the Inventory tab, you will see a new sub-tab called “Products”. For those of you already tracking inventory, it will show to the right of the other tabs.

For those of you writing off cost of goods directly, you’ll also have access to the new Products tab, just without the extra Inventory tabs:

Editing your products

Click into your products tab to a see a list of every product that you have either sold or loaded purchase/cost information for. We show you each product’s name, SKU, how much has been sold and on what channels.

You can sort by product name, by SKU, number sold or revenue.

If you have multiple copies of the same product that use slightly different names, now you can correct that. The same holds for cases where you are missing SKUs or using the same SKU for different items. Correcting those makes it possible to fully automate your cost of goods sold and see your profit per order.

Automate Your TCGplayer Accounting

Based on popular demand, we’ve just released an update to Seller Ledger to help automate your TCGplayer accounting.

Do you sell cards from top games like Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, One Piece and Disney Lorcana? Well, now there’s an easier way to track your sales and determine your profits. Using our updated Chrome browser extension, Seller Ledger will regularly import the key information you need to determine the profitability and taxes owed for your business, including:

  • Card and pack item prices
  • Shipping collected
  • Commissions
  • Transaction fees
  • Item fees
  • Payouts

Plus, if you track your inventory costs with unique SKUs, Seller Ledger will automatically tie those sales back to the item costs, reduce your inventory and update cost of goods sold.

Seller Ledger matches payouts to your bank deposits

Seller Ledger does something pretty powerful when we import your sales, fee and payout history from TCGplayer. We compare all imported transactions from TCGplayer to the payouts we receive and make sure the sum total of all of the transactions in the payout match the amount of each payout.

We even organize your transactions into two sections when you click into your TCGplayer account: “Not paid out” transactions and “Paid out” transactions. In fact, from the TCGplayer account summary view, you can click into any payout to see every single transaction that makes up that payout. This makes sure that your financial amounts from TCGplayer are accurate.

Lastly, if you choose to link your bank account to Seller Ledger, we will also automatically match the payouts that come from TCGplayer to the deposits when they show up in Seller Ledger. These are properly treated as transfers, so you avoid any risk of double counting.

How to automate your TCGplayer accounting

In order to link your TCGplayer account to Seller Ledger, you need only do the following:

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.

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

Sales Tax Calculation API is Now Available

Seller Ledger recently announced the ability to help eCommerce sellers track and report on their sales tax obligations. To make that possible, we built out a full sales tax engine, complete with state and local jurisdiction-level breakdowns. Now we are making that functionality available to developers and potential partners through the release of a sales tax calculations endpoint in our API.

How to calculate sales tax

To accurately calculate the sales tax on an eCommerce order, you need to know a number of things:

  1. The amount of each item within an order
  2. Whether shipping was collected from the customer and whether it is taxable
  3. The shipping address of the purchasing customer
  4. The states where you have nexus (physical or economic)
  5. The sourcing rules for a given order
  6. Whether the specific item is subject to any special tax rules or exemptions

Fortunately, Seller Ledger makes all of that simple. We automatically track nexus for you based on your account. And we make it very easy to submit the necessary information to our API to get the right amount to collect. If you collect enough information to properly fulfill an order, you will have enough information to tell Seller Ledger what it needs to know.

Coming soon: Product taxability

As of the date of this post, we are still working on a comprehensive set of product taxability rules. Stay tuned for that release.

Get the full breakdown

Because we have a pretty extensive history in sales tax (our founders ran product and engineering for TaxJar,) we know that a single tax amount isn’t sufficient for all clients. So, our API returns not only the total amount of sales tax due on an order, but we also break it down by how much is owed to each jurisdiction, including:

  • State amount collected
  • County amount collected
  • City amount collected
  • Special district amount collected

To learn more about our new sales tax calculations endpoint, visit our API documentation.

Pricing

Pricing for sales tax calculations is the exact same as it is for Seller Ledger. We simply charge you based on the number of monthly transactions you have flow through our system. Plans start at $10 per month with a 30-day free trial.

Automate Accounting for Square Sellers

In our continued efforts to simply eCommerce accounting, we’re pleased to announce the ability to sync your Square account with Seller Ledger. This provides the biggest step to better automate accounting for Square sellers. This functionality is now in open “beta”, meaning anyone can try it.

As we did before with our Shopify integration, we allow Square sellers to bring in both online and point-of-sale transactions.

To link your Square account, simply click the “Add Channels, Banks and Accounts” button on your dashboard. Then, click the Square logo:

Automate Square accounting

Log in to Square and, once you are returned to Seller Ledger, we will begin importing you transaction history. Doing so will allow us to bring in sales, returns, fees and even sales tax that you may have collected – all broken out in detail and summarized to help you with tax filing.

And as with any new functionality, we’d love to hear any constructive feedback you might have. Email us at [email protected].

Consignment Accounting

A while back, we wrote a pretty in-depth blog post about consignment sales and 1099ks. Since then, we’ve had a number of questions from customers about how to properly track consignment sales in Seller Ledger. And we’ve added a LOT of functionality to make that easier, so let’s dive right in.

Consignment sales

It’s not inventory

The first thing to realize when dealing with consignment sales, is that, even if you are temporarily taking possession of the items to sell, they do not count as inventory because they never belong to you. While this may seem odd, it’s actually pretty freeing from a tracking perspective.

Instead, all you need to do is keep track of the consignment items that sell, and the net profit from each of those sales, and how much you owe to the consignor.

Fortunately, Seller Ledger automates most of that.

Net profit of each sale

Most consignees (the people doing the selling on behalf of someone else,) negotiate payment terms based on the money earned AFTER subtracting costs like shipping and fees. Normally, this requires a lot of time spent in spreadsheets. But for many online sales channels, Seller Ledger does this for you automatically. We import the sale price, any shipping label costs, order-related fees – everything. See how we do it for eBay, Amazon, Walmart and other platforms.

In this case, let’s say you were doing a 50/50 split with the consignor. That would mean sending her/him $15.74.

Categorizing consignor payments

As mentioned earlier, the items you sell on behalf of your consignor do not count as inventory. Then the question becomes, how do you treat those payments? As mentioned in that prior blog post, the most common category we see used is “Commissions & fees.” By making sure each of those payments gets categorized that way, you have legitimate expenses to reduce your taxable income from consignment sales that may show up on your 1099k.

Frequency of payments

The odds are, you don’t want to have to be sending lots of small to midsize payments to a consignor, especially if you start scaling your consignment business. It would be better to keep track of what you owe each consignor and then send them payment on a regular basis when the amount owed hits a certain level. So how do you do that?

Well, it’s pretty easy. The phrase “how much you owe” should provide a clue. We just need to create a new “accounts payable” liability account that will keep track of how much you owe, and then when you pay it.

Tracking consignment commissions owed

To start, go to the Settings -> Accounts in your Seller Ledger account (or click “Manage accounts” on your Dashboard):

Scroll down the page a bit and click the button to “Add Liability Account.” Then, select “Accounts Payable” as the Account Type, pick a name and, optionally, a start date and opening balance.

If you sell items for more than one consignor, you might think about creating an account for each one of them. But as you’ll see, you can track all of your consignor payments in a single account too.

Now that you have created an account for tracking consignment amounts owed, click into it from your Seller Ledger dashboard to see options for recording bills and payments. Each time you have an item sell, and you calculate the commission based on the net profits we outlined earlier, simply click the button to “Record a bill” and enter the details for that commission amount. Don’t forget to categorize the amount owed as “Commission and fees.”

Consignment commission bill

As you sell more items for this consignor, continue to record those commissions within this account. You will see your account balance grow over time:

Tracking commission payments

Now, when it comes time to send a payment to your consignor, you have a couple of choices on how to do it. If you have a linked bank account where your payment is imported, you can categorize the payment amount as “Transfer: Consignment: Joes Garage”. Or, if you don’t have a linked bank account, just click into this account, click the “Make a Payment” button, and record the payment details. Because we have multiple commissions to be paid out, we can click the “Apply to balance” option.

Click “Record Payment” and voila – you have paid all of the outstanding money owed to your consignor. And better yet, you get to determine how often you make those payements.

Track Bills in Seller Ledger

As we recently announced with improved support for invoice tracking, we are also announcing similar improvements to tracking bills (a.k.a. money you owe to other people).

For those sellers that may pay vendors on Net 30 terms, or for consignment sellers, this new functionality should come in pretty handy.

Tracking bills

The first thing you need to do is to create a new account to track your bills. In accounting parlance, these are “accounts payable.” Again, go to Settings -> Accounts (or click on the “Manage accounts” link in the lower left part of your Seller Ledger dashboard). Scroll down the page to the Liabilities section and click the “Add Liability Account” button:

Next, choose the account type “Accounts Payable”, name your account, set an optional start date and opening balance, and you’re ready to start tracking bills.

Once you have created an account for tracking bills due, click into it from your Seller Ledger dashboard to see options for recording bills and payments.

Click the button to Record a Bill, fill out the details and click save.

Record payment of a bill

Very similar to how it works with Invoices, you have a couple of different ways to record payment of a bill. From within your linked bank account (or credit card,) you can categorize the payment amount as “Transfer: Bills Due”. When you do, you’ll see an extra button pop up to “Apply to Outstanding Bill”.

If you click that button, you’ll be shown any outstanding bills to which you can apply that payment.

If you don’t have your payment account linked to Seller Ledger, you can always click back into the Bills Due account, click the “Make a payment” button and record it that way.

Track Invoices in Seller Ledger

As we continue to improve the product based on customer feedback, today we’re announcing the release of improvements to tracking invoices. In accounting parlance, this involves accounts receivable (money owed to you) accounts.

Why would I need to track invoices?

For many small sellers, cash-based accounting works quite well. You simply recognize income and expenses when you receive or spend the money. But as your business grows, you may choose to use more of an accrual model, where you recognize income when you make the sale, since payment can come a bit later. For that, you’ll need some new accounts.

Tracking invoices

To track invoices in Seller Ledger, you’ll want to create a new account. Go to Settings -> Accounts, or just click “Manage accounts” at the bottom of the account list on your dashboard.

Click the “Add Asset Account” button to see the following:

Choose “Accounts Receivable” as the type, give the account a name and, optionally, a start date, and you’ve created an account that will let you keep track of the money people owe you.

Now, once you’ve created your invoice account just click into it to start recording invoice transactions.

At the top of the screen, you’ll see buttons to “Add an Invoice” or “Receive a Payment”

Click “Add an Invoice” and you’ll see a screen like the following:

You can even split the invoice amount into multiple categories if you would like.

Tracking invoice payments

When a customer pays an invoice, you can record that payment in a few different ways.

If you have connected the bank account where checks and payments get deposited, you should see the payment for an invoice show up there. Simply click to categorize that payment as a transfer to the new Invoices account.

Notice that, as soon as you choose the Transfer: Invoices option, a button appears to allow you to “Apply to Outstanding Invoice.” Click that and you can mark the specific invoice as having been paid.

And if you don’t have a connected bank account, just click into the Invoice account and choose the “Receive a payment” button.

Invoice amount tracking only

At the present time, Seller Ledger only allows you to track the amounts of your invoices. We do not provide electronic sending of invoices. Not do we yet support the ability for customers to pay your invoices electronically.

Introducing Multi-user Support

As bigger companies have started using Seller Ledger, we’ve started to get more requests to provide access to multiple team members. Well, we now have that!

Like we did when rolling out access for accounting professionals, Seller Ledger account owners can grant access to other team members. The same permission restrictions apply – team members will be unable to do the following:

  1. Add or remove connected accounts, banks or credit cards
  2. Change your billing information
  3. Change your business name

To add a team member, simply go to Settings -> Business and click the button to “Add Team Member”.

This will pull up a form asking for an email address. Just enter that and click “Invite”.

Invite team member

That’s it. Your team member will receive an invitation to create an account on Seller Ledger to access your business books.

And, just like with accounting professionals, you can revoke access at any time. And there are no additional costs for using this feature.