A healthy online store requires good financial records, compliance with tax laws, and meeting financial reporting obligations. These ecommerce accounting tasks are more involved than those of traditional retail, and include handling data from multiple sales channels and complex factors like shipping costs and returns affecting COGS calculation.
Tracking and categorizing business-related expenses is another important ecommerce accounting task, including sales platform fees, web hosting, inventory purchases, shipping costs, supplier payments, software subscriptions, and other expenses. It’s also important to track and record customer refunds, chargebacks, and store credit transactions. Having accurate inventory tracking is essential to avoid overstocking and running out of stock, which are common reasons for ecommerce failure.
The balance sheet is the ultimate result of your ecommerce accounting efforts, documenting your company’s assets, liabilities, and equity at a given point in time. It’s necessary for obtaining financing, making informed business decisions, and filing your taxes.
In addition to completing regular accounting tasks, a successful ecommerce store will collect, track, and remit state and local sales taxes on a quarterly or annual basis. It will also register for and manage any international taxes, such as VAT and GST. Finally, it will be ready to respond to any audit inquiries from tax authorities. Using accounting software with accrual versus cash-basis flexibility, plus inventory management and a prebuilt, thorough ecommerce-focused chart of accounts for flawless categorization is essential to streamline ecommerce bookkeeping. A solution like Finaloop offers real-time syncing with your sales channel and payment processor to automate your P&L and POS reports, plus offers the added benefit of sales and expense data automatically matching across channels and POS systems. счетоводство на онлайн магазин