What do I actually need to record when selling on Amazon

[fab4]

If I am selling on Amazon, what transactions actually need recording. Is it just the Amazon fees and the money Amazon transfers to me or does every individual product sale on Amazon need to be recorded as well.

I'm asking because initially I thought that this would be easy. Online accounting software, integrate with Amazon and each and every transaction gets pulled in automatically. But - based on my research and some threads on here, it seems that integration isn't quite so simple. So the fewer I need to record the better.

 

[john1989]

Just post a weekly or monthly invoice based on the reports you have available from Amazon. You can do the same with their fees too.

 

[MyAccountantOnline]

If you dont need all sales recorded in your accounting records for your own use I'd do as John suggests, so when the Amazon payment comes into your bank account just split it showing the sales, refunds and fees etc which make up the total you've received. You cant just record the amount which you receive as it will understate your sales.

 

[Pish_Pash]

I record every sale, every return, every re-imbursement (from Amazon) & all their fees...but then again, I do FBA & by going this way allows me to keep the pipeline to Amazon nicely filled so that my stock at Amazon is replenished in good time.

Some may disagree, but i view Amazon, like a bank account that must be reconciled every fortnight.

 

[fab4]

Pish_Pash, That sounds like what I am looking to accomplish. How do you integrate your accounting software with Amazon?

 

[Pish_Pash]

Pish_Pash, That sounds like what I am looking to accomplish. How do you integrate your accounting software with Amazon?

With great difficulty. As you're likely about to discover (if you haven't already), there are few solutions that pull in your orders from Amazon, Ebay etc & pipe them to your accounts software (Linnworks->Tradebox->Sage is one third part solution, as is Brightrpearl I think).

I used a database (Access) to help with all of this...but it's a right 'Heath Robinson' kludged together as & when a new challenge presented itself.

In my opinion, if you're serious about online retail, there should be no talk of 'bulking up' & entering your sales/fees in a lump ...in this day & age, you need fine granularity of sales data to ensure you are ordering just enough of the right products just in time to meet predicted demand (& to predict demand, you need historic data)

 

[Energise Accounting]

Bright pearl is very good however, it is not the cheapest solution on the market but it will grow with your business you can integrate with Amazon,E bay, your own website and a physical shop if you have one and monitor all that you require sales,stock and returns.

It also has a built in accounts suite which is as good as i have ever seen but like i said it is not the cheapest.

 

[fab4]

Has anyone tried to to manually import individual transactions from Amazon via csv into their accounting package? I was thinking that in the beginning there won't be too many transactions. Not as real time as suggested by Pish_Pash but still easier than typing in everything by hand.

 

[Pish_Pash]

Just to clarify, I'm not doing it in real time, there's probably a lag of a few hours....

Sequence is...

1. Linnworks retrieves amazon orders throughout the day
2. At the end of the working day, I export the day's sales order data from Linnworks to a CSV file
3. The CSV file is then imported into MS Access
4. MS Access then crunches/formats the data & exports to a csv file, MS Access then runs 'Transaction Pro Importer' (a third party app to allow ease of import) which imports all the transactions in the CSV file into Quickbooks.

It looks quite unwieldly, but it's just a button press for each one of those steps (therefore 4 button presses sees all my Amazon sales data entered into Quickbooks - it takes me about 1 minute). The reason I use MS access in step 3, is to allow me do other 'value added' stuff (email VAT receipts to customer automatically, stock prediction etc)

You could replace the first step (Linnworks) & use a downloaded Amazon order csv file instead ....but if you are selling on Ebay, you'd have to do the same for that that too...Linnworks essentially pulls all your sales channels into one.

But I won't kid you that it's easily do-able (it's taken me yonks to lean all the new skillsets needed)...but I was forced to go this way, due to the lack of suitable 'off the shelf' offerings.

You might be interested in this...

http://linnworkstools.com/

...which looks very encouraging.

Basically Linnworks integration into Quickbooks.

It essentially does what I'm doing (but without the pullaver) ...it wasn't available at the time of me setting of on my journey of discovery, but if it was, I'd have probably just ponied up for that service!