Why you need cloud accounting for E-Commerce business

By ANITA SAJKIEWICZ

You may notice that our profile description has changed. It now reads:

Digital Accountant for E-Commerce | Paperless Accounting | Transactions Automation in the Cloud | XERO Migration and Integration with Amazon Shopify WooCommerce

And that’s because we’ve made a decision to focus primarily on helping e-commerce and online businesses migrate and automate their accounting function with Xero.

We noticed that more and more e-commerce businesses are having serious problems…

We\’ve been doing this for some time and we noticed that more and more e-commerce businesses are having serious problems with accounting and reconciling their Amazon, Shopify of WooCommerce transactions. The problem is that the traditional accounting software like Sage are desktop based and they have no real time connection with other applications which register e-commerce transactions.

Xero cloud accounting is different…

Xero cloud accounting is different. It integrates smoothly with most common e-commerce application and your e-shop transactions will flow seamlessly to the accounting system. This will make the reconciliation much easier and will save you tons of time needed for processing manual entries.

They will need to account for all these transactions…

E-commerce businesses do not always realise that eventually they will need to account for all these transactions which flow through their online shop. Many of them try to manage online sales using spreadsheets and the reconciliation to the accounting system seems a never-ending story. And I agree. This can be a nightmare.

We should move away from using spreadsheets…

The thing is that nowadays we should move away from using spreadsheets. While they are fantastic tools, they still require a lot of manual input from people and this can be extremely time consuming. Entering your total sales as a one line journal at the end of the month or year (worst case scenario) is not a good solution!

You can save yourself a lot of pain if you migrate your e-commerce accounts to a system like Xero.

You may think that you don’t need regular accounting for your e-commerce business…

You may think that you don\’t need regular accounting for your e-commerce business. After all the money is flowing in and it will be grand if you do the accounts once a year. You can\’t be more wrong…

I’m telling you this will be a challenge…

Imagine you sell 300 items per month. If you multiply it by 12 you get 3,600 transactions! Not to mention purchases you have to make to earn the revenue. Will you find an accountant who will process all of them in a few days to prepare your annual accounts and tax return? I’m telling you this will be a challenge. If you are lucky to find one, they will probably charge you a fortune.

Do not make a mistake of looking for savings by cutting on bookkeeping and accounting services…

Many small businesses make a mistake of looking for savings by cutting on bookkeeping and accounting services. Ultimately, it costs them much more to get the accounts in order retrospectively. Don\’t make this mistake and get your books in order from the start.