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 are pleased to announce that Mercari sellers can now import their sales report into Seller Ledger.
Like Poshmark, Mercari does not provide a public API, so we can’t automatically grab your transaction history like we can with Amazon, eBay and Etsy. But, just as we do with Poshmark, we allow you to upload the Mercari sales report.
Step 1: Download your Mercari sales history
In your Mercari account, navigate to the Seller dashboard (under your profile image.) From there, click on “Sales report.” You will be asked for both a beginning and end date for your transaction report. Once you have selected the date range, click the “Generate report” button.
You should see a .csv file generated, with a name that begins with “Custom-sales-report” and ends with the date range you selected. Download that file to your computer.
Step 2: Add a Mercari 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 Mercari.”
After clicking the Mercari button, enter a name for your new account and click “Create Account”
Step 3: Upload your Mercari sales report file
Once you’ve created your new Mercari account, you’ll see it among your list of connected accounts on the Dashboard. Note the icons that differentiate between accounts that automatically connect and those that require CSV files be uploaded.
Clicking into the balance shown for your new Mercari account and click the “Import History” tab. Here you will see the option to upload a CSV file. Choose the file you downloaded from Mercari 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 Mercari file is.
Step 4: Categorize your Mercari payouts properly
If you have connected a bank account to Seller Ledger, there’s a good chance your Mercari payout totals are showing up there. To ensure that nothing is getting double-counted, make sure to categorize those payouts as transfers. Simply scroll to the bottom of the categories list and find your new account.
Step 5: Remember to regularly update your Mercari sales in Seller Ledger
Because we can’t pull in your new sales and expense information on the daily, 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 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.
We are proud to announce that Seller Ledger now connects directly with your Amazon Seller Central account to help automate much of your Amazon business accounting. As with eBay and Etsy, you can link your Amazon Seller Central account to Seller Ledger and we’ll regularly import your sales and expenses and automatically categorize them for you. Just log into your dashboard and click the “Add Account” button to link your Amazon account.
Also, like with eBay and Etsy, you can always change how you’d like to see your Amazon information categorized by customizing your settings.
Thanks again to the customers who helped us in testing this new integration. Amazon did limit the number of people we could link during the beta period, so we may yet see some new transaction types. If this happens, you may see your Amazon import pause, and we’ll be notified on the back-end to add support for the new transaction type.
Amazon has also listed us in their Selling Partner Appstore, where customers are able to learn more about the product and leave reviews. We’re big fans of customer word of mouth, so if you have an opinion about Seller Ledger and would be willing to share it with other prospective customers, please do.
Next up:
We’re actively working on a Mercari import solution (similar to what we recently announced with Poshmark) and the ability to upload CSV files for poorly or unsupported banks. If you would be interested in beta testing either of these features, please email us at [email protected].
eCommerce sellers, large and small, now have the ability to track inventory with Seller Ledger. Until now, customers could only write off inventory as “cost of goods sold” when purchased. But no longer!
Why track inventory in Seller Ledger?
There are a number of reasons to track inventory:
For most eCommerce sellers, the IRS requires that you do so.
It better aligns costs with your sale.
If done properly at the item level, it can help automate accurate stock levels (avoid stockouts,) as well as tell you how much money you make on individual orders and items.
So what does Seller Ledger offer in terms of eCommerce inventory tracking?
There are now 2 main ways to track inventory in Seller Ledger: what we call “balance-level” and “item-level” tracking.
Do you already keep a spreadsheet of all of your inventory, including how much you paid for each item? When an item sells, do you have to go back and update it? Have you tried to figure out how much money you make on each sale? If you can answer “yes” to any of these questions, then this option is for you.
While a bit more effort is required, the steps are quite simple:
When you purchase goods for resale, categorize them as Inventory purchases
Within each purchase, enter each item, including a unique SKU value, and the item’s cost. This process works very similar to splitting transactions.
Alternatively, you can start from your list of sold items (the order history we’ve already imported for you) and just tell us which purchase transaction included the item sold.
If you provide Seller Ledger with this level of detail, we do a few things for you automatically when an item sells (matching first based on SKU first, then by name):
We reduce the stock level for that item in your inventory
We calculate and generate the cost of goods for that item
You do not. If you would prefer to just categorize inventory purchases as “cost of goods sold,” you are free to do so. But, you might want to make sure you understand the risks with that approach. We’ll be writing another post about that option soon.
How do I try this out?
Just discovering Seller Ledger? Start a 30 day free trial right now – no credit card required.
For existing customers, just log into Seller Ledger, and you will see two new changes to the website. First, on the left of your Dashboard, we have added and made visible a new “Inventory” asset account. Second, there is a new top-level navigation link for Inventory. For those who previously categorized inventory purchases as “cost of goods sold,” you can elect to switch to properly tracking inventory. We explain more about how that works here.
Is there an additional charge for tracking inventory in Seller Ledger?
No – this feature is available to all customers at no additional charge. Unlike other accounting/bookkeeping platforms, we think even the smallest sellers should be able to see how much money they make on each item and keep on top of their inventory stock levels.
Please tell us what you think
This is a pretty big release, and represents weeks of work and planning. It’s also something we never got to tackle with Outright/GoDaddy Bookkeeping. As such, we’d love to hear from you as you try this new functionality – the good, the bad and the ugly.
Another one of the most frequently requested enhancements has arrived: the ability to split transactions into multiple categories.
Do you have charges on your credit card for multiple items that belong in different categories? Do you have deposits in your bank account from marketplace payouts that represent net amounts, after combining sales, shipping and subtracting fees. Well, you no longer need to choose a single category for each of those. Now, when you click the button to “Categorize” a transaction, you will see a new option to “Split” that transaction:
Now, click on the “Split Transaction” to break that transaction into multiple categories:
Notice that as you enter an amount in each row, the remaining difference is updated, to let you know how much of the original transaction you still need to account for. As you can see, you also have the ability to “Add Splits” to provide more detail.
For those of you selling on platforms like Poshmark, Mercari and others, who don’t provide APIs, this feature should help you get your numbers more accurate (in order to better match any 1099-k’s you may received.) Though feel free to contact those platforms and tell them to “get with the times”:)
As always, please let us know what you think of this change by emailing us at [email protected].
One of the biggest remaining tasks that we’ve been working on simplifying is the ability to categorize all of your “uncategorized” transactions as quickly as possible. Well, today we took a big step forward by announcing 3 changes:
First, we’ve added some logic to shorten the descriptions we receive from banks and credit cards to shorter, more recognizable merchant and customer names.
Second, when you click on a dashboard button for “uncategorized” transactions (or if you click the “Uncategorized” filter button in your account view,) you will now be presented with a page that shows all of your uncategorized transactions grouped by merchant name or description, sorted by transaction count. This allows you to knock off the biggest grouping of uncategorized transactions as quickly as possible.
Categorize many transactions at once
Three, we have added the ability to select multiple merchant names/descriptions so you can categorize multiple groups of transactions at once. Do you see multiple vendors where you buy items for resale? Select them all, click “Categorize”, choose “Cost of Goods Sold” and boom!
Please let us know what you think of this change by emailing us at [email protected] or commenting on this post.
Update: April 2024
In the time since we launched this feature, we’ve updated some elements of the user interface. See below for a more current description.
When you click in from the dashboard, you’ll still see “uncategorized” transactions grouped by merchant/transaction name. But you may notice that we have some additional filters in the account views. You can always reproduce this option by clicking the “Type” filter and choosing “uncategorized”.
Now that we have officially launched, it is time to get back to making the product better and easier to use. To do that, we’ve focused on a number of enhancements that came directly from our customers.
Customize how eBay transactions are categorized
First up, we heard from a number of people that they would like to be able to change how eBay data gets categorized when it comes in. As a refresher, here is how Seller Ledger handles eBay transactions by default.
But, we’ve heard some great reasons to change the default settings. Some examples include:
Putting eBay fees under the “Advertising” category rather than “Commissions and fees.”
Putting Shipping costs under “Cost of Goods Sold” instead of “Office Expense.” There’s an interesting debate here, which we plan to tackle in a future blog post.
However, one of the coolest ideas was to let customers have eBay order amounts go under a subcategory of Product Sales, so that, if you are a multi-channel seller, you could have a profit and loss that starts with something like this:
Remember, if you want to use any sub-categories for eBay data, you’ll want to create those sub-categories first.
See your profit or loss by month, quarter or year
This one is pretty self explanatory:
Profit and Loss by quarter
On a related note, we also added totals to top right of the Income and Expense tabs, so when you drill down or filter for a specific date range and/or category, you can see the totals. This will also match the numbers your click from the profit and loss report.
Total of filtered expenses
Ability to delete sub-categories
A small enhancement, but for those of you who add a sub-category but then decide you don’t need it, or made a mistake, you can easily delete them. Of course, if you have categorized any transactions using that sub-category, you will need to re-categorize them. We won’t give you the option to delete a sub-category if there are any transactions using it.
That’s it for now. We’ve got a few other improvements coming soon, so stay tuned.
Launch day! Seller Ledger has officially exited its “Beta” period and now offers automated bookkeeping software that’s specifically designed for online sellers.
First, a “thank you” to our Beta customers
There is no way we could have pulled this off without the help of more than 300 online sellers who took the time to bang on our software to find the bugs, the data discrepancies, and the things that just weren’t easy enough to use. Your commitment to helping, your patience with the flaws, and your continuous communication made this possible.
What does it mean to “launch?”
No, we’re not throwing some big event (though we can’t rule that out for future milestones:) Launching simply means we are at the point where we’re asking folks to pay to continue using Seller Ledger. It also means we’re committing to supporting the product going forward. We still have big plans for improving the product. In addition to adding new marketplaces like Etsy, Amazon and others, we will also continue to prioritize smaller improvements to make the product easier to use.
Do I have to pay now?
While we’d certainly appreciate it, we are giving all of our Beta customers the same 30-day trial period they would receive if they just signed up today. But they have the benefit of keeping all of the data already in their account (including transactions for the full 2022 year where available.)
If you’re new to Seller Ledger, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial, import up to 90 days worth of sales and expense history from eBay, PayPal, banks and credit cards, and see for yourself how well the product eases your bookkeeping burden. We don’t ask for a credit card or any form of payment up-front. At the end of your trial, decide for yourself whether we’re providing enough value to pay for continued use. If the answer is no, that’s ok. We’ll just do our best to earn your business in the future.
