Ecommerce accounting

[busynessman]

Hi all,

We use sage line 50 for our accounting. My business partner does the accounts and we are now back tracking.

Is their an easy way to do this as it takes us absolutley hours, last night he did a week of accounts and we have a fair bit to do.

We export from each of our sites into sage, then go through every transaction and refund to reconcile it.


Is this the best way of doing it? I used to use kashflow and it was so much easier and a lot less time consuming but my business partner insists on doing it this way with sage buts its taking hours to back track. Do we have to reconcile every single transaction with paypal etc? these are sales on our websites and we do make a fair few a day accross all of them.

 

[Blackberry]

Can you not go back to Kash Flow? you've already proved how much quicker and easier it is beacuse it can link directly to your ecommerce sites.

surely your partner can see the benefits of this?

 

[wood1e2]

What are you back tracking on? Do you not use an import system into Sage? I believe there are several third party import wiggits!!

 

[johndon68]

Tradebox Finance Manager links Sage 50 to a number of online sales platforms and will automatically update and allocate sales invoices and payments to Sage...

John

 

[DuaneJackson]

Why is he insisting on doing it that way?

 

[busynessman]

To be honest kash flow was perfect, but he was used to sage.

What we do is export all the transactions from our ecommerce stores, then import them to sage.

then he goes through each invoice id and make sure we have recieved the money.

He is a chartered accountant by trade, but this seem to be so long whinded to me and is it necesary?

with kashflow, a few clicks and it was done, using the paypal importer.

All our transactions apart from a few cheques / postal orders come through paypal.

 

[Mike Ward]

Transaction reconciliation is a vital task in any type of business to ensure that you are getting paid for all for sales. It's unusual to have such a manual system and when you do for someone as senior to be devoting time to it. Do you have an office junior who can be trained up if you can't convince your partner to go back to a computerised system - they need to be able to identify the outstanding items quickly and follow these up yourself to find out what has happened - that's the value of the process. Missing a couple of payments could wipe out your daily profit from all the other sales !

Mike

 

[pressme]

For accounts I would be performing reconciliation on daily totals not individual payments. This way the max amount you are going to have to do the quantity of days in the month. Reconciliation of individual invoice amounts into an accounts package is madness.

 

[busynessman]

Thanks for that mike,

My business partner does the accounts out of hours so to speak. He wants to do it himself but im just thinking their has to be a quicker way.

He does this so that he knows exactly what happening with the business which i can understand. But like you say just seems a long time for him to spend on accounts when we could be moving the business forward.

 

[busynessman]

Hi all,

speaking to my business partner about using kashflow again.

Heres what he says.

As i understand it kashflow populates from paypal feed. If this is the case how will I ever have the control that my website does not request me to send an order of which i never recieve the money and vice versa.

Can you guys help me convince him!

 

[Mike Ward]

Someone must have set up the Paypal to Kashflow link and therefore could break the link. Kashflow is one of many systems - Paypal can download to various systems including plain old spreadsheets. I've got to say I'm not in agreement with the suggestion you only do daily recs, as this could hide a multitude of sins. It all depends on volumes of orders, and the value of missing an order - what's the point of sending out 20 orders to make a profit which could be losy by one missed payment. It is tedious but individual recs are the way to go.

Mike

 

[DuaneJackson]

Hi all,

speaking to my business partner about using kashflow again.

Heres what he says.

As i understand it kashflow populates from paypal feed. If this is the case how will I ever have the control that my website does not request me to send an order of which i never recieve the money and vice versa.

Can you guys help me convince him!

It wont show you an unpaid sale, it's based on PAYMENTS received into PayPal

Someone must have set up the Paypal to Kashflow link and therefore could break the link.

Yes, KashFlow and PayPal did. Why would it get broken?

KashFlow was the first accounting app in the world to be officially certified by PayPal for automating the accounting of PayPal transactions

 

[busynessman]

Thanks mike that helps a lot, guess i was looking for an easier way. It dosnt help that we have a back log at the minute of a few weeks.

Just seems such a long way to do it. Im still going to get him over to kashflow as i found it so much easier. To give you an idea we are probably over 1500 sales behind and then theirs december to do which is the busiest.

Il recommend that we pass the work onto some one else as seems the best option.

 

[Homshaw]

I do accounts for a client with a massive paypal account

I download it to a csv file, import it to excel, insert a couple of columns and run it through a pivot table. I then input it by journal.

It takes minutes

There are lots of people who would know how to do this if you ask around . Once you've done it a couple of times it straight forward

Peter

 

[busynessman]

Thanks homshaw.

Il be sure to pass this info onto him and hopefully will be the end of long hours putting in invoices and paying them off.

 

[strikingedge]

Which shopping cart software do you use?

KashFlow integrates with a fair few e-commerce shopping carts already - such as Zen Cart & Magento.

You could import the order automatically into the shopping cart, and then use the KashFlow PayPal importer solely to add payments to each order - which is a semi-automatic process.

The advantage of doing it this way is that the order importer should (especially if it is one of our ones!) correctly import different currencies, taxes, gift certificates and account for rounding differences between the cart and the accounts software.

You'd also have the reconciliation process as a check for your partner.