An online retailer often has thousands of small sales per month but only a few incoming payments. Amazon, eBay, and other marketplaces pay out in batches and deduct fees, advertising costs, refunds, and reserves beforehand. If you only record the payout, you lose track of revenue and expenses. That’s why we post entries based on the marketplaces’ settlement reports.
Payment services like PayPal, Stripe, Klarna, or Mollie act as separate accounts between the customer and the bank. We manage them like bank accounts, reconcile balances, and assign fees, currency conversions, and chargebacks. At the end of the month, every balance must match what the service itself shows.
Returns are part of everyday business. Refunds to customers, returned merchandise, and credit memos must be matched to the corresponding sales. There are also shipping providers, packaging, and fulfillment services, which often send combined invoices.
If you sell to other EU countries or keep goods in warehouses abroad, you face VAT questions in other countries, such as the EU’s OSS procedure or registrations. The tax advisor assesses this. We give them the sales figures by country, exactly as the platforms report them. Marketplaces also report their sellers’ sales to the tax authorities themselves, which makes bookkeeping that matches these figures all the more important.
An online store also functions as a warehouse. Goods are often imported in large quantities, stored in your own warehouse, at fulfillment service providers, or at Amazon, and are not sold until months later. To ensure that large purchases do not skew the monthly report, we reconcile purchases and inventory with the figures from your inventory management system, if you use one. At the end of the year, your tax advisor will need an inventory count, including goods stored in third-party warehouses.
