How do you do accounting?

Brikomania

Hello, and happy new year!

For the past few months, I have been managing a simple excel sheet, where at
the end of the month, I would input all orders, expenses (shipping, fees) and
I would get a simple balance of the month.

I am now looking to do it in a more serious way, and have been looking at programs
such as Intuit Quickbooks, and other alternatives, but I wanted to ask more experienced
sellers here in the forum first.

How do you do accounting for your shops? Do you do it at the end of the month,
or in every single transaction you take note of it? What program(s) do you use?

Any help will be appreciated!!

Thank you all.

Calibrick

Honestly, I do it via an uber Excel spreadsheet I built - I love Excel because I can bend it to my will and use VBA to do some fancier stuff, like copying refunds to different tabs, etc.

I paste in raw data weekly or biweekly PayPal, Brickowl Order, Brickowl Fee, and Brickowl Order Item reports. My algorithms may using lookups to mycost for each item and it auto-calculates all kinds of stuff, plus auto-populates a mocked up of my state tax filing (for sales/use tax) and Schedule C. Also gives me some basic metrics, such as orders by state (so I can track toward hitting the thresholds for WayFair vs. South Dakota, as an example). I also track shipping costs, mileage, etc. in it.

I only do it weekly or biweekly though as I donate 10% of all my sales weekly to the Crohns and Colitis Foundation of America. Otherwise, I would probably just update it monthly if I wasn't doing that (and really then just to see how I'm doing vs. cost of goods sold).

NelisSolis

I do the regular business accounting in GnuCash. Not an easy application to start with from scratch, but I had used it before so I already knew the quirks and tricks. Besides that I use two Excel spreadsheets:
- Sales Overview: populated with all orders (BL/BO/other), and is updated almost daily. I use this one to get all orders (independent of sales platform) in a standardized layout. It outputs (on a manual command) to both GnuCash and the Sales Analysis spreadsheet.
- Sales Analysis: This spreadsheet is updated at least weekly. It is a spreadsheet that has grown fast (both in data volume and complexity) over the years. Besides the input from the Sales Overview spreadsheet, it also contains all relevant information about part-outs and inventory additions I did.

robernat

@Brick_Top depends how you operate I suppose, one will always use more data then another, or be required to provide more data then another (depending on country or business structure)
In my early days as 'pro' I was making a bill of each order, as of march 2018 I stopped doing so, and only make bills for substantial orders, particular when 'export' related (=out of EU).
All other orders are pulled from the websites (download in excel) per month, then split in EU blocks and non EU blocks.
I check and correct the individual orders in the related excel sheets (refunds and such), and compare that to the dashboard (per month) to have a full match. When everything matches, I generate 2 bills (also with Excel): one for EU orders, one for non EU orders, usually with each 4 lines (BO orders, BL orders, S&H BO, S&H BL) and make a referral to the 'attachments' (the full orders overview sheets).
Pretty easy.

Besides that I use my BL inventory 'my cost value' as my yearly guideline of 'stock count', for the size of my store this is more then enough for bookkeeping purpose.
Obviously I need to keep it accurate (doing so tomorrow to close down 2018): When I purchase sets, I don't always part out , so I need to go over my last year purchases, check whether or not a set was parted out (I keep the Brickstock records) or still sitting there, in the latter case I need to add the set straight into my inventory until I part it out (unless I decide to sell it as a set).
The only thing I need to do then is to say 'stockvalue = xxxxx €' to my bookkeeper, he does the rest with his formulas and tells me how I did...
All incoming bills (Purchases, Bookkeeping costs, Seller fees, Supplies, etc) are in the 'IN section' of my bookkeeping, the only big exception is Paypal (sigh on them for not giving me a proper bill) which is booked as a financial cost (1 download on 31/12).
With those figures my bookkeeper submits my VAT declaration (just done, I'll be refunded over €500 VAT for 2018, yippe ya yé).
By june he'll submit my personal taxes (dayjob + sidejob in Lego based on all figures), and that's it.