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Selling on Amazon is a great way to get your products out to a huge market in a simple way. You can start small, but scale quickly if your products get traction. This can create operational challenges, none more so than for finance. Ryan Pearcy, SB Digital Associate Partner, looks at how you can make your life easier when it comes to reconciling Amazon transactions.
Reconciling Amazon transactions can be a challenge, accounting for sale price, VAT, refunds, charges, settlements and what is kept in the Amazon reserve accounts can be confusing and time consuming, especially if you choose to do this manually. There are multiple approaches to this, so let’s explore some of these.
Manual
The basic way to handle transactions is manually. Amazon create a settlement report for every deposit into your bank and this can be entered into your finance system as a journal.
The settlement reports are not the easiest to interpret and it is common for these to be posted incorrectly if there is a lack of experience in finance and specifically e-commerce accounting. They are also not designed in a way that enable you to split out transactions per product or product group, making it impossible to segment your reporting in your finance system.
A key item to flag at this stage is to ensure VAT is accounted for correctly for Making Tax Digital. To do this you should ensure settlements are occurring daily so that your accounting transactions are logged on the day your sales take place.
Manual posting these transactions in volume is time consuming and prone to error. Bank rules in tools like Xero normally would help here, but the complexity of the settlement reports means both these and automatic document entry apps such as Dext cannot process these transactions accurately.
In summary, manual posting is not a viable solution as you seek to scale.
Direct links
Some finance software have direct links to the Amazon reseller platform. QuickBooks Online (QBO) and FreeAgent are examples of these, whereas Xero and Sage Business Cloud do not have direct integrations at the time of writing this article (June 2024). The QBO solution is free, whereas FreeAgent charges £6 per month from 30 April 2024.
The QBO offering splits out transactions automatically and shows your top selling products, as well as how many orders and income you have. It does not track inventory and the automatic allocations are not editable so you cannot control how it posts. It does not have great reviews which highlights its limitations and complexity.
The FreeAgent offering only works on UK sales and needs a new version of the Mettle bank account to support settlements. It is a relatively new release and on that basis is still proving itself in the market.
Integrator tools
The complexity surrounding e-commerce sales from a financial perspective has led to a large volume of connector tools that automate the postings into finance systems. Examples of these are A2X, Dext Commerce, Linkmybooks, Synder, Weava and SaaSant, but there are more available.
Each one operates slightly differently but with the ultimate objective of automating all postings so that you don’t need to do anything. They allow you to customise allocations, make adjustments and review what is going on.
A2X is probably one of the first built and reliable, with the ability to split per product to specific nominals and tracking categories. This enables granular reporting in your finance system if you need it.
Dext Commerce is another powerful tool in this space, which is more flexible but not as simple to follow when opening. If you use Dext Prepare it would make sense to use this tool as they are building offerings across their various platforms.
Another one to mention is Weava as this can calculate Pan European VAT based on your order’s destination and tax jurisdiction, a highly complicated area once you start selling abroad. It should be noted that Weava only works for the EU and cannot handle US sales tax.
All of these tools require customisation upon setup but are simpler than working with the Amazon settlement reports or the direct integrations. They all come with a monthly cost, averaging between £15 per month and £100 per month based on volume and number of sales channels.
Inventory systems
Once you move into multiple sales channels, so that Amazon is just one offering, handling finite stock across these channels becomes a challenge. Rather than manually updating every item on every channel daily, there are inventory management solutions that connect to these channels, such as Amazon, and automate this. Examples of this are Expandly, Unleashed and Cin7. These tools handle inventory management from purchase to sale, updating availability and pushing transactions through to the finance system.
Expandly is a tool that has grown into managing inventory across platforms. It will reconcile transactions but does not handle the inventory management side that well.
Unleashed updates the inventory value in Xero, enabling you to have confidence in your profits, but will push across every transaction.
Cin7 enables you to consolidate transactions daily, minimising transaction volume in your finance system which is important for scale.
Best choice for you
The best tool for you as an Amazon seller is based on your current business position and system setup, as well as where you expect to be in the near future. The integrator tools are a strong and reliable offering and one we tend to recommend, but an inventory tool may be a more suitable selection depending on your needs.
We always advise speaking to an expert to ensure you select the right system for your needs, get this implemented correctly and have someone to reach out to for support if things change. The SB Digital team can assist so please reach out to Ryan if you have any queries by calling 0330 058 6559 or by emailing hello@scruttonbland.co.uk
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