Category: Inventory

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.

Just go to the Reports tab, and choose the new “Gross Profits” sub-tab:

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.

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.

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.

For eCommerce merchants who want to track their inventory stock levels and per-item gross profit, we’ve now made it easier for higher volume sellers to load their inventory information into Seller Ledger.

If you make large purchases from certain vendors, and don’t want to type all of those items into Seller Ledger, there’s now an easy way to upload your items (and cost information) via a CSV file. Simply generate a comma-separated file that contains columns with headings of “sku“, “product name“, “quantity” and “total cost” and upload it inside of any of your inventory purchase transactions.

Not only can this help you save time when entering purchase information, but it comes in particularly handy if you want to start the year off fresh, or import inventory from another platform.

Read more about how it all works in our knowledge base article.