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ThomasWoodAndLumber
Level 1

Help with a complex sales entry

The move from side-hustle to more of a serious small business has left me with a year-long trail of payment entries that are hard for me to get straightened out in my books.  For many months, I had customers paying me from Etsy, or Shopify, or PayPal, or Venmo, then I would transfer that money to my personal checking account.  From there, I'd make an internal bank transfer to my business checking account to make it available for business purchases.   Now I have entries from all these service in my personal account, and then the amount is noted as a transfer to my business account.  There's no clean way to note that a sale of an inventory item for some amount resulted in a fee of X from the service (e.g. Etsy) and a deposit of Y into my business account.  Anyone know a good way to clean this mess up?  Thanks!

Solved
Best answer March 11, 2022

Best Answers
Rustler
Level 15

Help with a complex sales entry

First thing is to reassign the business checking account to all the third party payers so that funds go where they are supposed to.

 

Second thing is to not wait until it is tax time to review your accounting to see if it is right.

 

You will have to do the research to find the item names, then do an inventory adjustment, set the adjusting account to COGS and lower the qty of the items sold.

 

You should be booking the total amount of the sale, and reducing that amount prior to deposit by the fee's and shipping charged by the third party sellers. Typically folks use a sales receipt to record the sale of inventory items to a generic customer, etsy, shopify, etc. Paypal and venmo are not sellers, they are basically checking accounts holding your funds.

 

If you do the sales receipt on a daily or at least weekly basis, create a service item that links to the fee expense account, and another that links to the shipping expense account. List the items sold and the retail amount, then follow that list with the fee item, set the qty to negative one and the amount of the fees... Do the same thing for shipping expense.

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2 Comments 2
Rustler
Level 15

Help with a complex sales entry

First thing is to reassign the business checking account to all the third party payers so that funds go where they are supposed to.

 

Second thing is to not wait until it is tax time to review your accounting to see if it is right.

 

You will have to do the research to find the item names, then do an inventory adjustment, set the adjusting account to COGS and lower the qty of the items sold.

 

You should be booking the total amount of the sale, and reducing that amount prior to deposit by the fee's and shipping charged by the third party sellers. Typically folks use a sales receipt to record the sale of inventory items to a generic customer, etsy, shopify, etc. Paypal and venmo are not sellers, they are basically checking accounts holding your funds.

 

If you do the sales receipt on a daily or at least weekly basis, create a service item that links to the fee expense account, and another that links to the shipping expense account. List the items sold and the retail amount, then follow that list with the fee item, set the qty to negative one and the amount of the fees... Do the same thing for shipping expense.

ThomasWoodAndLumber
Level 1

Help with a complex sales entry

Thanks for the help!

> First thing is to reassign the business checking account to all the third party payers.


This is done, thankfully.

>Second thing is to not wait until it is tax time to review your accounting to see if it is right.

I have an extensive spreadsheet with every transaction, sale, expense, etc on it.  I'm trying to migrate this to QuickBooks to be more "professional".

>If you do the sales receipt on a daily or at least weekly basis, create a service item that links to the fee expense account, and another that links to the shipping expense account. List the items sold and the retail amount, then follow that list with the fee item, set the qty to negative one and the amount of the fees... Do the same thing for shipping expense.


Thanks again.  This is what I'll do!

 

 

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