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Retail and online stores

Bookkeeping for retail and online stores

A sale in the shop lands in your bank tomorrow. The same sale online lands twelve days later, bundled with forty others, minus fees and refunds. Same margin, completely different paper trail.

We record both properly, keep inventory on the books, and report margin by channel every month so you can see which side of the business is actually earning.

Book a free 20-minute call 805-225-4959

Who we work with

Retail businesses across Ventura County.

  • Shops, boutiques and Main Street retail
  • Brands selling on Shopify, Amazon or Etsy
  • Businesses running a storefront and a website at once
  • Anyone holding stock and guessing at their margin

Three things that break retail books

These are the ones we find in almost every file we take over.

The payout

Deposits get treated as sales

A Shopify or Square payout is whatever survived fees, refunds and chargebacks, and it rarely covers a clean period. Booked as revenue it understates your sales, makes the fees invisible, and never agrees with what your POS says you sold.

Result: two systems that disagree, and no way to tell which is right.

The stock

Inventory is one number a year

Purchases stand in for cost of goods sold until the CPA adjusts it at year end. Every month in between shows a margin that reflects the timing of your last big order rather than the profitability of what you actually sold.

Result: you cannot tell a good month from a large delivery.

The channels

Everything lands in one bucket

Store, website and marketplace revenue all post to a single sales account. The totals are correct and completely useless, because the channel carrying the business and the channel quietly losing money look identical on the page.

Result: you keep feeding whichever one feels busiest.

What's included

The monthly cycle, built for retail

  • Store sales from the POS: gross sales, discounts, returns and sales tax recorded as separate figures rather than one net number
  • Online payouts unbundled: every deposit broken back into gross sales, platform fees, refunds, chargebacks and shipping income
  • Sales split by channel: the shop, your website and each marketplace on their own lines, so margins can actually be compared
  • Inventory reconciled: receipts and purchases matched against your counts, with cost of goods sold recognized when an item sells rather than when you paid for it
  • Landed cost: freight, duty and inbound shipping built into what a unit really cost you, not left sitting in an expense account
  • Sales tax tracked: what you collected, by jurisdiction, handed to whoever files, with a flag if your sales into a state start approaching nexus
  • Monthly reporting: revenue, margin and inventory turns by channel, plus a call to walk through what moved and why

What we connect

  • Point of sale Square, Shopify POS, Clover and Lightspeed
  • Online Shopify, Amazon, Etsy, WooCommerce and eBay
  • Tools A2X for payout detail, Avalara for sales tax
  • Accounting QuickBooks Online or Xero

If you sell somewhere we have not listed, we will tell you on the first call whether it connects cleanly or needs a monthly import.

Typical fit

Shops, boutiques, brands and online sellers carrying real inventory, doing roughly $500K to $10M a year, whether that is one storefront, one website, or both at once.

Selling almost entirely online? eCommerce accounting goes deeper on payouts and sales tax. Carrying a lot of stock? Inventory management covers landed cost and unit economics.

What a sale actually earns you

The same sixty dollar item does not earn you sixty dollars everywhere. In the shop you keep it less card processing. On your own website you keep it less the platform fee, the payment fee, and whatever shipping cost you did not fully pass on. On a marketplace you keep it less a referral fee that can run eight to fifteen percent before anything else touches it.

Reported by channel, that gap becomes a decision you can make. Plenty of retailers find the channel they have been pushing hardest is the one with the thinnest margin, and the quiet one nobody talks about is carrying the business.

We report it every month against the prior month and against the same month last year, because retail is seasonal enough that a month over month comparison on its own will lead you somewhere wrong.

What we report each month

  • Revenue by channel: store, website, each marketplace
  • Gross margin by channel, after fees
  • Platform and processing fees as a share of channel sales
  • Inventory value at cost, and how many times it turned
  • Shipping income measured against shipping cost
  • Discounts and returns as a share of gross sales

Want margin by product line or by vendor as well? We can build that in. It needs a properly structured item list, which we set up during onboarding.

How it starts

Three steps, and the first two cost you nothing.

1. A 20-minute call

What you sell, where you sell it, what you hold in stock, and what you currently cannot answer about your margin.

2. A quote in 24 hours

A flat monthly price in writing, plus a separate one-time cleanup fee if the books need rebuilding first.

3. Setup and first close

Channels and POS connected, inventory brought onto the books, then your first close with margin by channel in it.

What we do not do

Said up front, so nobody finds out in month three.

  • We do not count your stock. We reconcile to the counts your team takes, and we will help you build a count sheet that follows your shelves rather than the alphabet.
  • We do not file your sales tax returns. We keep the numbers right by jurisdiction and hand them to whoever files, and we will tell you if you look to be approaching nexus somewhere new.
  • We do not set your prices or plan your buying. We give you the margin and turn data those decisions need, and we are happy to sit on the call while you make them.
  • We do not manage your listings, your ads or your store platform. We account for what they produce.
  • We do not cover the cost of your accounting software or your connectors. Those are billed to you directly by the vendor, so the accounts stay in your name.

Retail bookkeeping FAQ

I sell in a shop and online. Do I need two sets of books?

No, and you should not have them. One set of books with channels tracked separately gives you a true total and a real comparison. Two files means you reconcile them yourself every month, which is usually the thing that made you go looking for a bookkeeper.

The work is all in the setup: one item list, one inventory count, and every channel mapped back to it. Once that is right, adding a new sales channel later is a small change rather than a rebuild.

How do you handle Shopify or Amazon payouts?

We unbundle them. Each payout gets broken back into gross sales, platform fees, refunds, chargebacks and shipping income, so your revenue is what you sold rather than what happened to land in the bank.

We use A2X for this on most files. It pulls the settlement detail reliably, which means the numbers reconcile rather than being estimated and then quietly adjusted at year end.

Do I really need to count inventory?

If you want a margin you can trust, yes, and monthly is the minimum. Your team takes the count and we reconcile the books to it.

If you have never done a proper count, the first one is the hard one. We will tell you what to count, how to record it, and what to do about the gap between the count and what the system thought you had, because there is almost always a gap.

What about sales tax in other states?

We track what you collected by jurisdiction and flag it when your sales into a state start approaching the threshold where you would owe there. Where the volume justifies it we use Avalara.

We do not file the returns. We hand clean numbers to whoever does, whether that is your CPA or a filing service, and we will tell you well before a threshold becomes a problem.

My margin looks different every month. Is that normal?

It is common, and it is also meaningless. If cost of goods sold is coming from what you purchased rather than from what you sold, a large order in March makes March look terrible and April look excellent. Neither is true.

Once inventory sits on the books properly, margin stops swinging with your buying and starts reflecting what actually sold. That is usually the change clients notice first.

My books are behind. Where do we start?

With a free review of the file. We tell you what is actually wrong and quote the cleanup as a separate one-time engagement, so you can weigh what fixing the history costs against what the monthly service costs.

With retail it is usually worth doing, because if inventory was never on the books, last year's margin was never real either, and neither was the tax return built on it.

Find out what each channel actually earns you

Twenty minutes on the phone and you'll have a flat quote within a day.

Book a free 20-minute call 805-225-4959