Ecommerce & DTC

Ecommerce Bookkeeping That Keeps Up With Every Order

Split payouts, platform fees, refunds, inventory and multi-state sales tax — we turn ecommerce chaos into clean, reconciled books, so you always know your true margin.

QuickBooks & Xero certified Colorado LLC · US business hours
Ecommerce Bookkeeping That Keeps Up With Every Order
200+US businesses served
4.9 ★★★★★217 reviews on Fiverr®
5 YearsIn business
QuickBooksCertified ProAdvisor
XeroCertified Advisor
See it clearly

Your Shopify payout is not your revenue.

One deposit, and everything hiding inside it.

What hits your bank$9,820The single number most books record as "sales" — and the reason margin looks wrong.
Gross salesWhat customers actually paid you+$12,400
Shipping collectedIncome, not a rounding error+$310
Platform & processing feesShopify Payments, apps, transaction fees−$372
Refunds & chargebacksNetted out, so your true refund rate disappears−$1,690
Sales tax collectedMoney you owe a state — a liability, not income−$828
Record the $9,820 as revenue and five things vanish at once — your real sales, your fee load, your refund rate, your shipping income and a tax liability nobody has booked. This is the single most common error in ecommerce bookkeeping.

Illustrative figures, shaped like real books — your numbers will differ, the pattern will not.

Ecommerce & DTC

Ecommerce accounting breaks generic bookkeeping.

Here's what we handle that most bookkeepers miss.

Payout reconciliation

A single Shopify or Amazon payout bundles sales, fees, refunds and taxes into one net number. We break every payout down to the penny.

Real COGS & inventory

We track cost of goods sold and inventory so your P&L shows actual gross margin — the number that tells you if you're really making money.

Sales tax & nexus

Sell into enough states and you owe tax there, even remotely. We keep your books nexus-ready and coordinate filings — no surprise bills.

Fees, refunds & chargebacks

Processor and marketplace fees quietly eat margin. We categorize them clearly so you see what each channel really costs.

Multi-channel, one truth

Selling on your site plus a marketplace or two? We consolidate every channel into one accurate picture.

Cleanup & catch-up

Months or years behind? Reconciling backlogged ecommerce books and getting you tax-ready is one of our most common projects.

How we untangle it

From chaos to clean books.

Shopify · Amazon · StripePayouts bundling sales, fees, refunds & tax
flows in →← reconciled
Clean monthly booksRevenue, fees and COGS each in the right place — margins you can trust
Online seller packing a customer order into a cardboard box

Bookkeeping built for how online stores actually make money.

Ecommerce is deceptively hard to account for. The money that lands in your bank is never your revenue — it's revenue minus platform fees, minus refunds, minus sales tax collected, plus or minus reserves and chargebacks. If your books just record the deposit, your Profit & Loss is wrong, and every decision built on it is a guess. We reconcile each Shopify, Amazon and Stripe payout to its underlying orders so your revenue, fees and taxes each land in the right place.

On top of that, inventory and cost of goods sold (COGS) decide your real gross margin. We track COGS properly so you can see margin by channel and product, price with confidence, and spot the SKUs quietly losing you money.

Shopify

What generic bookkeeping gets wrong about Shopify.

These are not edge cases. They are in almost every Shopify file we open.

Payouts booked as revenue

Shopify deposits a net figure. Recording that as sales hides your processing fees, your refunds and your shipping income all at once — understating revenue while overstating margin.

Sales tax counted as income

Tax you collected is money you owe a state, not money you earned. Left in revenue it inflates your top line and quietly builds a liability nobody has recorded.

No COGS, so no real margin

Without cost of goods sold tracked against the right period, gross margin is a guess. Most stores we take on find their margin is several points lower than they believed.

Refunds netted, not recorded

A refund inside a payout disappears. You lose sight of your true refund rate, which is one of the most useful numbers a store has.

Gift cards treated as sales

A sold gift card is deferred revenue — a liability until redeemed. Recording it as income means paying tax early on money you have not yet earned.

Multi-channel double counting

Shopify plus Stripe plus PayPal plus Amazon, all landing in one bank account, is where the same sale gets recorded twice and nobody notices for months.

Open your P&L and find revenue for last month. Then open Shopify and find gross sales for the same month.

If those two numbers are close, your books are almost certainly wrong.

They should not match. Shopify gross sales is what customers paid. Your bank received that minus processing fees, minus refunds, minus chargebacks, plus shipping collected, plus sales tax collected. If accounting revenue equals bank deposits, someone has recorded the payout as one line and every component has vanished.

That single shortcut is the most common error in ecommerce bookkeeping, and it materially changes what you think your business earns.

Amazon

Why Amazon breaks ordinary bookkeeping.

The settlement report is the hardest document in ecommerce accounting. It is also the only honest one.

One deposit, forty fee types

Referral fees, FBA fulfilment, monthly storage, long-term storage, returns processing, removal orders, advertising, reimbursements and refunds — all netted into a single number.

Settlements straddle month end

Amazon settles on a two-week cycle that ignores your month end. Booked on deposit date, your monthly figures are wrong by up to half a settlement period, every month.

Reserves look like lost money

Amazon holds funds back. That balance is an asset you own, not a fee. Ignoring it understates what the business is actually worth.

Advertising buried in the deposit

Ad spend deducted at settlement gets absorbed into "Amazon fees" and never appears as marketing cost, so nobody can calculate real return on ad spend.

Reimbursements counted as sales

Amazon reimbursing you for lost inventory is not revenue. Treated as a sale it inflates both income and apparent margin.

No per-product profitability

Without fees allocated back to products you cannot tell which SKUs make money. Most sellers discover at least one bestseller loses on every unit.

Your true fee percentage. Not the referral rate Amazon publishes — the total of everything Amazon deducted, divided by gross sales.

Sellers usually estimate 15%. Once FBA fulfilment, storage, returns processing, removals, advertising and reimbursement adjustments are correctly separated, the real figure is commonly between 30% and 45%.

You cannot get to that number from a bank feed, because the bank only ever sees the net deposit. It appears only once settlement reports are reconciled properly — and until it does, every pricing and product decision is being made on a number that is roughly half right.

What's included

Ecommerce clients get.

Clear deliverables, every month — nothing vague.

Monthly reconciliation of all sales channels, processors and bank/credit accounts
Inventory & COGS tracking so gross margin is accurate
Sales-tax-ready books and coordination of state filings
Clean categorization of platform fees, refunds and chargebacks
Monthly Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow reports
A dedicated point of contact and a secure document portal

Tools we work with.

Your sales channels, payment processors and sync apps — reconciled into QuickBooks or Xero so payouts, fees, refunds and COGS all land in the right place.

Shopify logoAmazon Seller CentraleBay logoEtsy logoWooCommerce logoWalmart MarketplaceStripe logoPayPal logoKlarna logoA2XLink My BooksBill.comGusto logoQuickBooks logoXero logoShopify logoAmazon Seller CentraleBay logoEtsy logoWooCommerce logoWalmart MarketplaceStripe logoPayPal logoKlarna logoA2XLink My BooksBill.comGusto logoQuickBooks logoXero logo

Using something else? We almost certainly work with it — just ask.

★★★★★
“This company has handled my books for over a year now. I'm thankful that they are always there for me and I can count on them being competent.”
Caleb DeHart
Verified on Trustpilot →
Good to know

Ecommerce bookkeeping FAQs.

Everything a ecommerce bookkeeping owner usually wants to know.

QDo you work with Shopify and Amazon sellers?
A

Yes. We reconcile Shopify, Amazon, WooCommerce, Etsy and most major platforms, and integrate them with QuickBooks Online or Xero for clean monthly books.

QCan you handle sales tax for online sellers?
A

Yes. We keep your books sales-tax-ready, help you understand where you have economic nexus, and coordinate multi-state filings so you stay compliant.

QHow do you track inventory and COGS?
A

We record cost of goods sold and reconcile inventory so your Profit & Loss reflects true gross margin — not just cash in and out.

QI'm behind on my books — can you catch me up?
A

Yes. Cleanup and catch-up is one of our most common ecommerce projects. We'll reconcile back months (or years) and get you tax-ready.

QWhich software do you recommend for ecommerce?
A

Most ecommerce clients do best on QuickBooks Online or Xero, often paired with a sync tool like A2X. We set it up as part of onboarding.

Know your real numbers.

Book a free video consultation and we'll review your store's books and recommend the right plan — no pressure, no jargon.

No long contracts · Cancel anytime · Response within 1 business day
Our work

What this looks like in practice.

A representative engagement in this industry. Outcomes vary by business.

Ecommerce business

Challenge

Multiple sales channels and payment processors made monthly reconciliation slow and unreliable.

What we did
  • Reorganized the chart of accounts
  • Reconciled Shopify, Amazon and processor payouts
  • Improved transaction mapping and COGS
  • Established monthly reporting
Outcome

Reliable, timely monthly financial reporting management could trust.

Free 30-min consultationNo pressure, no jargon
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