Accounting

Intuit has not published a discontinuation date for QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise. What it has published is narrower and more specific than the rumors suggest, and a seller planning a five-year horizon should work from the actual documents rather than from what a forum thread said in 2024.

A multichannel month-end close in QuickBooks Desktop works when it runs in dependency order: cash first, then channel clearing accounts, then accruals for open settlement periods, then inventory and cost of goods, then review. Skip ahead and you will produce a profit and loss, discover an invento...

eBay's published final value fee for most categories is 13.6 percent. The rate a seller actually pays, measured against the money they keep, is higher. The reason is buried in one sentence on eBay's own fee page: the fee is calculated on "the total amount of the sale, including the cost of the it...

A class in QuickBooks is a tag you attach to a transaction so you can filter reports by it later. A location is the same idea with different plumbing and a few behavioral differences. Neither one is an inventory construct, neither one changes the ledger, and neither one is smart. They are dimensi...

Walmart Fulfillment Services charges by weight, by volume, by calendar month, and by how badly you packed the inbound shipment. Roll all of that into one WFS expense account in QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise and you will know what Walmart cost you last month, but you will not know which SKU is los...

For a seller doing roughly $2M a year across three or more marketplaces, the choice is not Desktop or Online in the abstract. It is QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise Platinum or Diamond against QuickBooks Online Advanced, because those are the only two configurations that hold the list volume, user c...

It depends which edition. Intuit's help article on new US subscriptions states that after September 30, 2024 it stopped selling new subscriptions of QuickBooks Desktop Pro Plus, Premier Plus, Mac Plus, and Desktop Enhanced Payroll in the United States. The same article states directly that "Quick...

TikTok Shop looks like the cheapest marketplace a seller can list on and frequently is not. The headline referral fee is 6 percent, which undercuts every major competitor. Underneath it sit two costs that no other channel has in the same shape: creator commissions you set yourself and pay per sal...

Migrate balances, not history. Pick a conversion date, bring the trial balance across as an opening journal, keep the QuickBooks file readable for the prior years, and start clean in Xero from day one of the new period. Sellers who try to replay three years of marketplace transactions into a new ...

eBay charges its final value fee on the total amount of the sale, and eBay defines that total to include the item price, handling charges, shipping the buyer paid, and sales tax. You pay a percentage on money you hand straight to a carrier and on money eBay collects and remits to a state. Miss th...

Walmart settlements are not harder than Amazon settlements. They are shaped differently, and the difference shows up in three places: the fulfillment fee is calculated per item from weight and dimensions rather than from a flat category rate, storage carries a seasonal surcharge, and returns are ...

Most first-time sellers learn ecommerce accounting the expensive way, at tax time, from a CPA's invoice. Here are the answers up front, in plain language, so you set it up right before the mess starts.

The conventional advice is that QuickBooks Desktop is legacy software and everyone should be on cloud accounting by now. For a large, inventory-heavy ecommerce seller, that advice is often wrong, and the reason is the part of the close that nobody else solves.

Bank reconciliation is the routine check that your books and your bank agree. For an ecommerce seller it is also where you catch the silent errors that marketplace payouts hide.

AI in accounting is surrounded by equal parts hype and fear. This is a plain-English FAQ for ecommerce sellers who want to know what it actually does, what it cannot do, and where the real value sits.

A spreadsheet is a fine way to run a side hustle and a terrible way to run a $2M brand. The signs you have outgrown it are specific, and the move off it is more straightforward than the spreadsheet's complexity makes it look.

The fear that keeps sellers on the wrong software is losing years of history in the move. That fear is misplaced. You do not migrate every transaction. You migrate balances, and you keep history where it already lives.

The seller who gets surprised by a tax bill in April is almost always the one who estimated quarterly taxes off bank deposits instead of margin. The deposit lies. Your margin does not.

Cash accounting records money when it moves. Accrual records it when it is earned or owed. For an ecommerce seller, the gap between those two moments is where the truth about your margin lives.

The question is not whether AI will replace your bookkeeper. It is which parts of the job should never have been done by a human in the first place, and which parts a machine should never touch.

Most sellers divide ad spend by new customers and call it CAC. That number is usually wrong by a wide margin, because it ignores half the real cost of acquiring a customer. Here is how to calculate CAC properly from your books.

The break-even point is the level of sales where you make exactly zero profit. Everything below it loses money; everything above it earns. For ecommerce, calculating it correctly means loading in the fees and per-unit costs most sellers forget.

Most sellers treat bad bookkeeping as a tax-season headache. The far bigger cost is invisible: every operating decision you make all year runs on numbers that are quietly wrong, and you never see the bill.

A 13-week cash flow forecast is the most useful financial tool an ecommerce operator can build, and you can stand one up in an afternoon. Here is exactly how, row by row.

Your P&L can show a $40,000 profit while your bank account drops to zero in the same month. That gap is not an accounting error. It is the difference between profit and cash, and it is where ecommerce businesses die.

The cash conversion cycle tells you how many days your cash is trapped inside the business before it comes back as collected revenue. For an inventory-heavy ecommerce store, it is the single clearest measure of cash health.

MRR is the predictable revenue your subscriptions produce in a month. ARR is that figure annualized. Both are only as accurate as the revenue recognition underneath them.

A subscription brand that books the full prepaid year as revenue on day one is not growing fast. It is overstating its income and setting up a correction it will hate.

Deferred revenue is money you have collected but not yet earned. On your balance sheet it is a liability, because you still owe the customer something.

Multi-state sales tax is the most common source of compliance anxiety for ecommerce sellers, and it's also the place where misinformation is most prevalent. The questions below show up over and over in ConnectBooks onboarding calls. Direct answers, no consult-your-CPA cop-out, based on the actual state of the law in 2026.

A chargeback is a forced reversal of a card payment, initiated by the cardholder's bank rather than by you. For your books, it behaves nothing like a refund.

Margin erosion almost never shows up as a single bad day. It shows up as a quarter that came in 4 points light, by which point the cause is buried under ten thousand transactions. An AI CFO reading your books daily catches the drift while it is still a few cents per unit.

Gross margin tells you a product makes money. Net margin tells you the business does. Ecommerce sellers who confuse the two scale themselves straight into a loss.

Cost of Goods Sold is the direct cost of the products you actually sold in a period. For ecommerce sellers it is the single number that decides whether your margins are real or imagined.

After reviewing hundreds of ConnectBooks onboarding files, the same eight accounting mistakes show up over and over. Each one is fixable, and each one has a real dollar impact on either decisions or on your tax return. In order of how much they cost.

Marketplace facilitator tax is the framework that shifts sales tax collection and remittance from individual sellers to the marketplace platform itself. For ecommerce sellers, it changes what you file on, what you collect, and what your sales tax liability is at any given moment.

Landed cost is the complete per-unit cost of getting a product from your supplier into your fulfillment center, ready to ship to a customer. It is one of the most consequential numbers in ecommerce accounting, and one of the most consistently miscalculated.

The setup decisions you make in the first thirty days of an ecommerce business compound for years. Get the chart of accounts wrong and you spend the next twelve months reformatting reports. Get it right and your books answer questions instead of generating new ones.

These are the questions we hear most from sellers running three or more sales channels. Direct answers, no fluff, with the trade-offs called out where they matter.

A marketplace settlement is the periodic payout an ecommerce platform sends a seller after deducting fees, refunds, taxes, reserves, and adjustments. Every marketplace settles on its own schedule with its own format.

Contribution margin is the dollars each unit sold contributes toward covering fixed costs after variable costs are paid. It's the number that tells you whether selling more of a SKU makes you more money or just makes you busier.

Variable cost of goods sold is the portion of a product's cost that moves with each unit sold. For multi-marketplace ecommerce sellers, it's the number that determines whether a SKU actually makes money once you ship it.

Most ecommerce sellers choose accounting software the wrong way. They start with price, or with whichever tool their accountant already knows. The better approach is to start with the seven things the software actually has to do, then see which tools clear the bar.

Discover the ConnectBooks Accounting Portal and how it simplifies client access, permissions, and collaboration for accounting firms and bookkeepers.

Inventory turnover is calculated by dividing the cost of goods sold by the average inventory. This metric helps businesses assess how efficiently they are managing their inventory levels. A higher turnover ratio indicates better efficiency in selling products and managing stock levels.

Boost your profits with Product Profitability Analysis. This guide helps identify top performers, reduce costs & make strategic decisions to increase sales.

This comprehensive guide explores sales tax for businesses, covering rates, registration, nexus, compliance tips, and the impact on consumers and sellers.

Hiring an accountant with expertise in ecommerce can help streamline financial processes, maximize tax deductions, and ensure compliance. Look for professionals familiar with online sales platforms and digital payment systems to optimize your business's financial management.

The art of comparison isn't just an academic exercise; it’s a crucial business strategy, especially for those in the competitive world of Amazon businesses. Imagine you're scaling a steep cliff, the view from each new vantage point shifts and offers fresh insight into your ascent – such is the power of benchmarking in scaling the heights of retail success - a benchmark opens your eyes to what is possible.

Accounting is a profession that, in many ways, has stayed the same for well over a century. However, the advent of eCommerce businesses has brought new complexities to accounting work, and has even led some bookkeepers and accountants to specialize in eCommerce accounting. While you may not be an accountant yourself, you will need to understand the ins and outs of eCommerce accounting to determine if an eCommerce accountant is the right choice for you and your business.

Shopify bookkeeping and accounting can take a toll on your patience. While Shopify is an excellent eCommerce platform, it doesn’t always make it easy to know how much you’re making and, just as importantly, how much you’re spending on things like shipping and fees. This can make it challenging to ascertain the viability of your business and determine how much money you’re actually making when all is said and done.

If you’re trying to upgrade your eCommerce accounting, you’ll need to learn about a Chart of Accounts (COA). While you don’t have to be a CPA to understand the concept and use it to make better decisions for your business, a COA will often serve as the backbone of your accounting processes. Surprisingly, many entrepreneurs are not well-versed in COAs or how they work in the context of an eCommerce store.

As an Amazon Seller, you almost have no choice but to turn to third-party platforms to handle your bookkeeping and accounting needs. Though Amazon does offers a multitude of reports, no single report provides a complete picture of your business finances.