Invest in the Best: Why You Need an eCommerce Bookkeeper

Was tax time a walk in the park or a nightmare that won’t end? If you answered with the latter, perhaps it’s time to hire an eCommerce bookkeeper. Making tax time easier is one obvious reason to get professional help. But there are actually many more reasons that you can benefit from year-round.

3 Reasons To Hire an eCommerce Bookkeeper

While there are several reasons why you should hire an eCommerce bookkeeper, here are the top three.

Greater Accuracy and Analysis

First of all, having timely and accurate books can give you the data you need to make better business decisions. If you find yourself putting off your bookkeeping and then scrambling to finish it all at once, you probably don't take the time to analyze the results and learn from the findings. For a lot of people, completing the bookkeeping tasks and marking them as completed is the maximum amount of work they can manage to do.

Your time as a business owner is best spent looking at the data and determining what trends need your attention.

Many people think they “know their numbers” because they touch every transaction by doing their bookkeeping. However, there is a difference between knowing every transaction is legit and in the right bucket and truly taking the time to know the state of the business. If you must make the trade-off, spend your time on the analysis step because someone else can do the bookkeeping.

The Game is Always Changing

Next, keeping up with the software and IRS changes required for correct reporting takes time. If you aren’t making the time to stay up on the latest, then you will likely be doing clean-up work when your tax preparer starts asking questions. Babysitting bank connections and updates to eCommere bookkeeping software takes time and attention. This is tedious work! I wish the integrations never broke, but they do, and reconnecting often creates new problems.

When you reconnect bank feeds to your accounting software, you must ensure that there is no gap of data that did not import and conversely, you must ensure you did not import duplicate entries.

Both situations can create big issues, even if you catch them early. If you fail to catch it at all, you may be overstating or understating your actual financial data, which is another huge mess to deal with.

How Do You Know What You Don’t Know?

Finally, you don’t know what you don’t know. One client told me when he came on board, he only did a physical count and valuation of his inventory once a year. When we talked about how that worked, he explained that the prior year he went from an $80k net profit to a loss. Ouch! I suggested that he begin an inventory “true up” on a quarterly basis.

Knowing that you were losing money one quarter would undoubtedly influence how you operated your business for the rest of the year. But waiting until tax time put this client way behind in making changes to his products and his pricing. It never occurred to him that he could do this process quarterly or monthly.

On several occasions, we have worked with clients who have a “warning” notification on their Amazon seller accounts. These clients were using Amazon Pay and could see sales were made using this service. However, when they read the warning, they learned that their bank was not connected. Unfortunately, they decided to disregard the message because they knew they were still getting payouts from Amazon.

What they failed to realize was Amazon requires a separate bank connection for their Amazon Pay service. In the past, we have discovered between $12k and over $100k for clients who didn’t realize that Amazon was holding these funds until a bank account was connected. While it’s a nice surprise to collect a $100k payout all at once, think about how that money could have been used to benefit the business!

An eCommerce Bookkeeper Saves You Time and Money

When you choose to hire an eCommerce bookkeeper, you're not just spending money, you're investing in your business's success and your personal well-being.

By working with a bookkeeper for eCommerce who is familiar with the retail industry and its complexities, including sales channels, merchant processors, and software, you can free up time and mental energy to focus on other important aspects of your business. This might even allow you to spend more time with your family, which is probably one of the reasons why you started your business in the first place - to create a better life for yourself and your loved ones.

If you’re ready to take eCommerce bookkeeping off your plate, reach out to the bookskeep team today!