Ventura Bookkeeping Nav
Call us805-225-4959 Book a free 20-min call
Ecommerce accounting

Your Shopify payout is not your revenue

A $10,000 deposit might be $12,400 in sales, minus fees, refunds, chargebacks and tax collected on your behalf. Books that record the deposit understate your revenue and overstate your margin, and every decision after that is made on the wrong number.

We reconcile every payout back to the orders behind it, so your P&L shows what you actually sold and what it actually cost.

Book a free 20-minute call805-225-4959

Every eCommerce client gets

On every channel you sell through.

  • Every payout reconciled to the orders behind it
  • Fees, refunds and chargebacks split out, not netted away
  • Cost of goods sold recorded when the sale happens
  • Margin by channel, so you know which one is worth it

Three things that break online sellers' books

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

The deposit

The payout is booked as a sale

One lump sum lands in the bank and gets recorded as revenue. Platform fees, refunds and shipping vanish inside it, so revenue reads low and expenses read low with it.

Result: you cannot see what a channel really costs.

The inventory

Stock is expensed when it is bought

Inventory purchases hit the P&L on the day they are paid for rather than the day the product sells. Profitable months look terrible and slow months look great.

Result: margin by product is guesswork.

The sales tax

Tax collected sits in income

Sales tax is money you are holding for a state, not money you earned. Booked as revenue it inflates your numbers and hides a liability that is growing quietly.

Result: a surprise when a state finally asks.

What's included

The monthly cycle, built for online sellers

  • Payout reconciliation: every deposit from every channel tied back to the orders, fees, refunds and adjustments that make it up
  • Fees separated by type: platform commission, payment processing, fulfilment, storage and advertising as their own lines rather than one lump
  • Returns and chargebacks: recorded against the original sale so your net revenue is real
  • Cost of goods sold: recognised when the item sells, including landed cost where you import
  • Inventory position: reconciled to what the platform and your warehouse actually say you hold
  • Sales tax liability: tracked by jurisdiction through Avalara, with what the marketplace remitted kept separate from what you owe
  • Channel reporting: revenue, cost and margin by channel and by product, delivered monthly with a call

Channels we connect

  • Shopify
  • Amazon
  • eBay
  • Etsy
  • BigCommerce
  • WooCommerce

Connected through A2X, with Stripe, PayPal, Square and Shop Pay on the payments side. Selling somewhere else? Ask, and we will tell you honestly whether we can reconcile it properly.

Typical fit

Sellers doing $250K to $25M a year across one to four channels, holding physical inventory, with sales tax exposure in more than one state.

Sales tax, without the guesswork

Marketplaces like Amazon, eBay and Etsy generally collect and remit sales tax for you under marketplace facilitator rules. Your own store usually does not, which means the same business can have tax handled on one channel and entirely on its shoulders on another.

We keep those two streams separate in the books and track your liability by jurisdiction through Avalara, so you can see where you are approaching a threshold before you cross it rather than afterwards.

We are not a tax firm and we do not file your returns. What we do is make sure the numbers your filer works from are right, and tell you early when something needs their attention.

What we watch

  • Tax collected versus tax remitted, by channel
  • Economic nexus thresholds by state
  • Marketplace facilitator amounts, kept out of your liability
  • Registrations you already hold and filings that are due
  • Exempt sales and resale certificates

The Avalara subscription is billed to you directly and stays in your name.

Where eCommerce fits in our plans

eCommerce accounting is part of the monthly bookkeeping plan rather than a separate service. Which plan you need depends on volume and how many channels you run.

Startup Essentials

One channel, cash basis, modest volume. Payouts reconciled and the basics kept clean.

Business Growth

Multiple channels, accrual accounting, inventory and cost of goods sold done properly.

Enterprise Advantage

High volume across several channels, multi-state sales tax, and payroll included.

If your books are behind before we start, catch-up is quoted separately as a one-time engagement after a free review of your file. See full pricing.

Your first 30 days

1

Discovery call

Twenty minutes. What you sell, where you sell it, and what the numbers are not telling you.

2

Quote in 24 hours

A flat monthly price, plus a separate one-time cleanup fee if you need one. In writing.

3

Connect and rebuild

Channels connected, chart of accounts rebuilt for eCommerce, inventory and tax mapped correctly.

4

First close

Statements with margin by channel, and a call to walk through what they say.

What we do not do

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

  • We do not file your sales tax returns or represent you before a state. We keep the numbers right and work with whoever files.
  • We do not give tax advice on nexus or registration. We will show you the data and tell you when to call your CPA or a sales tax specialist.
  • We do not manage your listings, advertising or fulfillment. We account for what they cost and what they return.
  • We do not do physical inventory counts. We reconcile to the counts you or your warehouse provide.
  • We do not work in every platform. If you sell somewhere we cannot reconcile properly, we will say so before you sign anything.

eCommerce accounting FAQ

Why is eCommerce bookkeeping different?

Because the bank deposit is not the sale. A payout is a net figure after commission, processing, refunds, chargebacks, shipping and often tax collected on your behalf, and it usually covers a period that does not line up with your month.

Add inventory that has to be expensed when it sells rather than when it is bought, and sales tax rules that differ by channel, and a general bookkeeper working from bank feeds will produce numbers that look fine and are wrong.

Do you handle high transaction volume?

Yes. We do not enter orders one at a time. Sales are summarized by day or by settlement period and reconciled in total against the payout, which is both faster and more accurate than importing thousands of individual transactions.

Volume affects which plan fits, not whether we can do the work.

Can you fix last year before we start?

Yes. We review the file for free and quote the catch-up as a separate one-time engagement, so you can see what the history costs against what the monthly service costs.

With eCommerce it is usually worth doing, because a year of payouts booked as revenue means your prior year margin was never real.

Do I need Avalara?

If you sell into several states through your own store, it is the most reliable way to track what you owe and where. If you sell only through marketplaces that remit on your behalf, you may not need it yet.

We will tell you which situation you are in on the first call. The subscription is billed to you directly and stays in your name.

Which accounting software do you use?

QuickBooks Online or Xero, whichever you already have, with A2X handling the connection from your sales channels and Avalara tracking sales tax where you need it.

A2X is what makes the payout reconciliation reliable rather than manual. It summarizes each settlement into a journal that matches the deposit exactly, which is why the numbers tie out instead of nearly tying out.

What if I sell on a platform you have not listed?

Tell us on the call. Some platforms give clean settlement reports and are straightforward, and some make proper reconciliation genuinely difficult.

We would rather tell you before you sign than discover it in month two.

Find out what your margin actually is

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

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