Automate Ecommerce Accounting with these 6 Tools

 

Investing a bit of time to automate ecommerce accounting will allow you to focus on growing your business and give you more energy to spend on the things you love. When you automate your accounting tasks, you not only save countless hours every month (and a ton of pain come tax time), but you also bring joy back into being a business owner.

Let’s face it: not all entrepreneurs are numbers people. If you’re sick of manually reconciling accounts and uploading your receipts, there’s probably a way to make your life easier. There are a ton of accounting tools out there to help. These are some of our favorites.

Bookkeeping

This is the day-to-day stuff that seems kind of novel at first but can start to wear down the most enthusiastic entrepreneur over time.

Bench

Bench does your bookkeeping for you, pairing you with a real bookkeeper, and simple software to track your spending.

As a client, you’ll receive monthly financial statements, and Bench will use your data to properly categorize your merchant transactions—a must for any ecommerce business owner looking to simplify their bookkeeping.

With Bench:

• Your bookkeeper will do your bookkeeping for you
• All your bank and credit card transactions will be automatically imported into the app
• Your bookkeeper will categorize and reconcile all transactions (including merchant fees)
• Your bank statements and sales data will be automatically sent to your bookkeeping team
• Come tax time, your bookkeeper will prepare your tax package for you
• You can easily view and download your financial statements from the Bench app any time

Another nice thing about Bench is that since there’s a human component to what they do, they can tailor a plan specifically for your company (or companies), no matter how complex it is.

Price: $119–$299 per month.

Recordkeeping

Good business records aren’t just nice to have, they’re a legal must. If you don’t want to make an enemy of the IRS (and trust us, you don’t), read on.

Expensify

Because the burden of proof is on you to back up every item on your tax return with documentation, the best approach to recordkeeping is to keep as many records as you can.

Expensify saves you tons of time with their receipt scanning feature alone, and offers lots of other automations like corporate card reconciliation and digital receipt integration for apps like Uber and Lyft.

Price: Free–$9 per month.

Payroll

A bi-weekly ritual that your employees look forward to, but you probably dread.

Gusto

If you have employees and you’re not happy with your payroll setup, try Gusto. It’s dead-simple to use and makes those intimidating tasks feel relatively straightforward.

You can manage all your payroll and HR benefits from one platform, and if you ever have questions, you can ask one of their payroll specialists.

Sales tax

They’re not going anywhere, so you might as well make them as painless as possible.

TaxJar

TaxJar automates your sales tax calculations, reporting, and filings, and works for small or big companies.

It’s designed for ecommerce businesses using platforms like Amazon, BigCommerce, or Stripe. TaxJar also offers customer support when you run into an issue.

Price: Starts at $17 per month.

Tax filing

Yes, there’s an online service for that too.

Taxfyle

There are a few online tax filing options, but Taxfyle takes the most off your plate. They connect you with a tax professional who completes and files your taxes for you once you’ve answered a few questions and uploaded your documents.

Bonus: you can review and sign off on everything through their website or app.

The only question left is what are you going to do with all your free time?

Price: Starts at $49.

Profit analysis

There are more important things in life than money, but tracking profit is still a necessity of running your own business (and maybe the most enjoyable part of accounting).

SimplyCost

Without accounting for the cost of goods sold, you won’t be able to track the real profit you net from each sale or the true value of your inventory.

SimplyCost is made specifically for Shopify, and lets you generate profit-focused reports based on the cost of goods sold. You can set the cost of your goods for specific parameters within your sales history to paint an accurate picture of your actual profit.

Price: $4.99 per month.

Final Thoughts

You can reap a ton of benefits when you automate ecommerce accounting.

Looking for even more ideas on how to save time running your business? Check out The First Things a Small Business Should Outsource.