By Brittany Brown, CEO
I feel cheated by Amazon, don’t you?
You’re probably thinking, “I made $100k in sales, but only saw $70K deposit in my bank account. Where did all my money go?”
Because of this kind of confusion, we know that ecommerce accounting is so different and so much more complex than what other industries deal with.
It. is. A beast.
I know people in ecommerce have to deal with sales tax, inventory, COGS, AND multiple sales channels…just to name a few. (If you don’t know what all that means then we REALLY need to talk.)
With most other businesses, they send out invoice to their clients and get bills from their vendors. As these are all paid the activity moves through the bank account and is easy to see.
Our ecommerce world?….(deep breath here)…
The biggest challenge with ecommerce accounting is that most of the activity doesn’t happen in the bank account. It happens other places, like the sales channels, and only hits the bank account in summary form.
The typical accountant or bookkeeper doesn’t understand this.
They want to live in the bank account and track those transactions calling it good. (Those poor dears!).
Good ecommerce accounting requires a fearless dive into the channels that bury the data in back-end reports. It requires a courageous interaction with inventory systems and a warrior-like approach to payment processors and foreign currency transfers (because you know your suppliers are all over-seas.)
In my personal journey, I started an accounting solution for businesses, and we were willing to work with companies of all kinds (a rookie mistake).
We only had a handful of ecommerce clients, but we could see their accounting needs were very different than our other clients… I knew we were not serving their needs well and it kept me up at night.
I knew I had a choice to make. Either we go all-in on ecommerce accounting or we walk away completely.
I realized, then that I knew that no one else was prepared to serve them the way they needed AND in the way that I knew we could.
Even though our ecommerce clients only made up 3% of our total client base, I took a deep breath and decided to fire our non-ecommerce clients and go all-in.
Since then, we’ve nailed ecommerce, become recognized industry leaders in the space, and immersed ourselves completely in meeting your needs.
As an ecommerce business owner, it’s time to start getting your numbers right. Wherever you are in your journey, we’d like to help.
See you there!
