hello friends it's rob cosman from selling
from the beach and OAmasterclass.com i put together a quick video i get this
question a lot in my facebook group which if you're not a member of join hit the
link below and if you haven't subscribed to the youtube channel subscribe to the youtube
channel give it a thumbs up that'd be awesome uh bookkeeping basics for amazon sellers so a
lot of new sellers are like what do i need to do i don't know what i need to keep track of so i
want to kind of cover just a high level what i would do if i was starting all over if i was a
brand new seller and doing things kind of right from the start you know it's important that
you do get things right from the start because keeping books of records is important for
government agencies and paying taxes and all that fun stuff okay so remember you basically
need to keep track of everything that you're selling your revenues your costs all the expenses
everything needs to come together and if i was going to do it all again these are the tools
and how i would set it up so if i'm brand new this is how i do it now yes you can go use
spreadsheets you can do this you do that but i'm just giving you this is an ideal you want to
make your life easy you don't love bookkeeping you know there's a reason why people go to school
and make a career doing bookkeeping because it's not necessarily easy but i think in this video i
can give you enough information to kind of get you going that should be able to do you know maybe
75 80 percent of the work and then maybe that other 20 you know you're getting your account at
the end of the year to help you or clean up a few things but if you're doing you know most of the
heavy lifting here um using some of these tools and spending a little bit of time up front setting
up things correctly it'll save you all kinds of headache later on okay so what i would do i would
set up quickbooks online and i would pick the essential version which is the middle one because
it has multi-currency so i'm canadian i do canada and us i mean if you're doing canada us australia
eu you know multiversion currency is what you want because you're going to be collecting and
selling and all those different currencies so you're going to use that you need
to record your amazon revenues because so many people incorrectly think hey i got a
hundred dollars in my bank account from amazon that's my revenue no it's not you probably
sold a thousand dollars at first you paid 300 in amazon fees and amazon held back a bunch of
money for reserve because you're a new seller for refunds and so the correct amount is really
the hundred dollars is what you really sold plus you need to record all those amazon fees and
you have a reserve which is an account receivable so you need to record all those things not
just 100 right and that i would use this program called taxamate which is really cool
software basically it links up with your amazon amazon seller central pulls in all the reports and
populates it into quickbooks for you once you do a little bit of work up front to set it up it'll
do it all automatically every time and that could work in all the different marketplaces it can
also work in a few other things that i'll show you then you're going to record all your expenses
so the great thing with quickbooks online is you can link up with a lot of
different banks and credit cards so it'll automatically pull in the transactions
once you kind of make those connections so if you've got you know amex visa your different
bank accounts boom you set them all up it pulls in the transactions that's kind of half the battle
then you just need to basically classify those and what types of expenses they are and if you
paid sales tax on them that you could recover and then there's a few miscellaneous adjustments
you know that i put through like journal entries like for instance if you're selling in canada and
you're paying gst hst on your amazon fees you get that invoice once a month you want to claim those
back i would do those at a manual journal entry just little one-off things like that that are a
little funky and just trying to use quickbooks to do it but one thing to note quickbooks like some
people get hung up trying to use like the gst hst filing application in quickbooks i don't i don't
use that because quickbooks traditionally is like sends out an invoice um but we're not doing that
we're doing journal entries to record your correct amount right i mean it's easy if you just send an
invoice for a hundred dollars and that was your revenue but this isn't the case you're selling all
across different provinces or different states you have different tax obligations so you know don't
try to do that you go to quickbooks online this is what you're going to get i got links below
for some affiliate links for quickbooks and taxamate so hopefully if you learned something
took some action for this video click the link i'll make a couple dollars off of it and i'll
keep pumping out more videos grab the essentials again they always have different promos usually at
the end of the year when everybody gets all riled up like oh let's start getting our accounting
organized they'll have a deal but check it out sometimes there's coupon codes but this is what
it is right now the essentials is the middle now depending on they've changed their pricing
over the years and if you have more accounts or more users it might vary so just kind of be
cognizant of that so i signed up for quickbooks then here's a few things that you're going to
do this is a bit of a checklist to go through so turn on the multi-currency you're going to
go into settings to do that you're going to say turn on your multi-currency home currency is
whatever you're reporting in so if you're canadian it's canada canadian dollars you're going to
set up your sales taxes correctly again that's in the settings you set up your chart of accounts
this is where you can add in different chart of accounts you can buy our template i'll put the
link below that you can just upload and you'll have a bunch of very common you know amazon
fees and titles like that that you could use um that's an option and that's where you can make
certain accounts some people get hung up with should i put this in office supply should i put
this in you know whatever you can your chart of accounts is what works for you so if you want
a line item that is software if you want a line item that is virtual assistants you know you
can put those items in your chart of accounts just make a new account for it and you know you
decide how you want to track it you know it's not a big deal really the big buckets are like
are these expenses or these cost of goods sold the rest of it i mean just try to be reasonable
and then consistent year over year with how you book it if your software always goes to the
software line put it there if your va's go to a consultant line put it in there okay invite your
accountant we do this all the time because then you can invite your accountant to your books
and then they can just pop it online it's really easy take a look see if there's anything that
needs to be cleaned up or you have a question that's where you get into you know like for me
somebody has a question they'll send me an email i can pop in the book i can do a quick screen
video um just hey this is what i see this is how you do this one go do these other five this exact
same way and then send them a link to that and it's just easy to share and get on the same page
right link your bank accounts so you're going to go through you're going to type in your bank they
have so many of them here if yours isn't there you might have to manually create it and upload the
statements but a lot of them should be here and should just automatically link that's part of the
power of quickbooks online once you've set up that connection with your bank and your credit cards
then it'll automatically pull in the transactions when you first start it'll usually only go back
so far depending on how far the bank allows it or the credit card so in that case if you need to go
back further months you might have to download the statements usually in a csv file and then upload
them into you know just manually that's not a big deal because you're gonna bulk upload what i would
suggest when you first do that if you have to do it take out the csv file just upload like one or
two uh transactions so that you make sure when you map it you map it correctly so it goes you know
it's like amount spent or amounts received because if you mess it up you only have to delete like two
you know two lines as opposed to like 30 or 40.
So i always suggest just do a trial first make sure
that okay how you mapped it when you upload it was correct then you're going to start to
go through and you go to the banking tab once you've got all these transactions in and
you're going to start classifying them so this is an example here of adobe that you know i always
set up a supplier customer so adobe's the supplier so you can set that up you're going to categorize
it set up adobe i'm going to put this as software subscriptions and adobe doesn't right now
doesn't charge me sales tax so i put zero rated and as you can see this is in us dollars and
switched over to canadian because it's a us credit card but this is what i would do and then i would
press add and there it goes now i've categorized it i put it in i've added it in i've approved it
i filled out these things but the real power then is if you want to set up rules so you start to put
in if you start classifying the same things like if i go through and i put in walmart and i say
it's got 13 hst on every one of those purchases then the rest of the transactions that have
walmart will come up if i do one or two quickbooks will try to prompt me and say hey do
you want to set this up as a rule so you can go through and manually set them up or you can do
it with you know kind of quickbooks prodding you along so in this case i said hey every every
one that comes through on this credit card that says walmart in it it's going to be an expense i'm
putting it to purchases canada cost of goods sold to pay use walmart.ca and i'm saying that has
13 hst now if you've got things like groceries maybe you're buying and some stuff has taxes
on and some stuff doesn't you'll need to be more aware in splitting out those transactions
based on what taxes you actually pay but this is so powerful and if you're doing the same thing
all the time especially if you're doing like oa and you're buying from the same vendors it just
makes life so much easier you can kind of set it up to automatically classify then you just
go along and press add add add or you can set the rules up to automatically add it it's up
to you but that's where you save a ton of time the next step then is taxamates you know
if we're capturing most of the expenses and things through the journal entry sorry through
the banks and the credit card statements taxamate will take care of the revenues and the amazon
fees so sign up for the free trial link below you're going to go through and connect your
marketplaces so i'm talking about amazon.ca amazon.com if you've got shopify walmart you can
connect all these different ones okay then you're going to come figure out where everything maps so
it'll walk you through and i'll say okay here is fba fees where do they go which account do you
want to put it to and you can use the defaults for most of the time but what i would suggest is for
the sales and the taxes i would put it to separate accounts depending on the market so if you're
selling on.com i would have account that sales says sales amazon.com and then if it's dot ca i
would put it to a sales amazon.ca right just so you know which sales are coming from which because
that'll help you when you do tax reporting okay so i would go through and i'd do that then you're
gonna you're gonna link it up and usually because of the throttling on amazon's api and seller
central it might only pull in a couple of the past settlements so you might have to manually
upload them it's really simple taxom8 has a great support and really good how-to documents so
you're basically going to go into seller central go to a certain file download the files and then
just upload them to taxom8 it'll prepare the settlements then what i suggest you do is you take
one once you figure out you've got it mapped and you've got things kind of set up i think correctly
i would push one settlement through to quickbooks check it see if it makes sense see if
you have it set up the way you like it and map correctly and if it does then you can
push the other ones and set it to automatically go and you never have to touch it again if not
you can just go back to texamate you select delete that one change your mappings push it through
again real simple okay so you test the setup then you just start matching your bank deposits
so whichever bank you're using you're getting paid into um taxamate will say okay there's the
deposit and when the cash comes in it says oh we've already matched it you say yes boom there
you go so now we've taken care of the revenues the only other few things just some miscellaneous
items that you got to think about again remember people go to school for bookkeeping people do
this as a profession so you know some things are a little complicated but we've covered the most of
it because you're going to get your revenues with taxom8 all your expenses should be coming through
you know with credit cards and bank statements now if you have credit if you have stuff you're
paying cash or out-of-pocket those aren't going to be there those are the one-off things you
might have to do manual journal entries for but so be it a few things to think about opening
balances on the accounts like if you first link up a credit card and it has an opening balance that
might pull through so depending on how you have it set up be wary of that cutting over your ends
so some people will say you know what i'm going to switch start quickbooks you know january 1
or whatever your year end is use those opening balances of whatever you have from your taxes
that you filed use those starting to go forward manual journal entries for tax invoices
so in amazon.ca you get these tax invoices where you're paying gst and hst i've
got videos on here on how to do them on my youtube channel check them out i
always do a manual entry for those things also determine how you want to record your
inventory and cost of goods sold so taxon made if you want taxonomy can help you estimate your
cost of goods sold every month i'd suggest this more for private label sellers that maybe only
have like 10 items and you can go in the back and specify okay each one of these and how much
the you know what their cost is and then it'll make journal entries to the cogs for you so what
you would do is you would always put everything in your inventory first all like every purchase that
you're making put it to inventory and then taxamay would just pull that out and put it to the cost of
goods sold cost of goods sold is only when things are actually sold and expensed right inventory is
the asset cost the expense so determine what you want to do there like for me i do oa so basically
i just go through and i put everything to cogs all year long expense it and then at the end of the
year i say okay what is my ending inventory value and then i adjust it that's the kind of things you
should talk to your accountant about at your end but i mean whatever whichever way you
decide whenever you're doing the purchases just stick to that so for me i put everything to
cogs and you saw that with the walmart example boom that's where it goes i suggest logging
in monthly make sure that things are all still connected sometimes like for instance american
express will kind of throw up and it won't connect for a few days so you just kind of to read
press the refresh to reconnect maybe log in again but then it should go back if you wait like four
or five months and you don't do it then you might have to go back and manually upload statements
again paypal if you can avoid it i would you know as the timing this tape paypal's a pain in the
butt because it pulls in different currencies and doesn't really recognize them correctly so it's
really difficult with quickbooks um i don't know why these guys really haven't figured it out but
they haven't if you only have a single currency like if you're in the us and all you deal with
is us then great or if you're in canada and it's just canadian but most you know people are sending
money all over the place at different currencies so that becomes a pain in the butt um the
accounts i said you might have to manually upload do the small test and the other thing is utilize
the quickbooks bank reconciliation so quickbooks will actually hook up with some banks and pull in
the bank statements and there's a little feature that gives you the bank reconciliation where
basically what you're doing is at the end of every month or the end of the bank period you're saying
okay what is in quickbooks what is on the bank statement everything that's on the bank statement
and the quickbooks should match and if it doesn't that's because something's missing somewhere so
we need to figure out what is missing or what's incorrectly classified because everything should
match and the bank reconciliation tool lets you kind of quickly figure that out and find those
weird anomalies and fix them before it gets too wild i think you know it's again supposed to
be high level i'm not going there's all kinds of resources in quickbooks and how to do things
even better and more detail but i just want to give somebody you know give you guys a high level
of hey if i was setting up brand new this is what i would use i'd use it as a sole proprietor
i definitely would use it as a corporation you know obviously these things are tools and they
cost money but these things are really important you know keeping track of your books and records
and your tax obligations and stuff like that that's kind of key and if i'm going to spend a
little bit of money i'm going to spend some money doing that to make sure i'm organized because then
you can free up so much more time to be doing what you're better at which should be sourcing finding
new products launching new products selling stuff right so hopefully this helped again links
below for a couple affiliate links some offers be sure to join our group like our
youtube channel keep updated thanks