This ensures your bookkeeping is up-to-date and you have money sitting in a bank account ready to pay your taxes on time. Instead of frantically trying to play catch-up on your bookkeeping how much is too much to pay for tax returns before the looming tax deadline or not having enough money set aside to pay the bill. Getting your VA to do it alongside any general, administrative work you assign to them isn’t much better. Unless you have defined bookkeeping systems and processes and an in-house controller managing the VA, the chances of your books being a mess are high.
Insufficient data
The advice you receive from your accountant and bookkeeper will only be as good as the information you share with them about your business, growth objectives, and challenges. For example, if you only give them basic information, they are going to provide you with more general advice and best practices. There are tons of nuances around payroll taxes, and it is one of the few things – along with student loans – that can be discharged even if you file bankruptcy. The primary difference between cash-based and accrual-based accounting is timing. Your chart of accounts is basically an index of all the categories you are going to use to organize your transactions. Unlike your P&L and balance sheet, how to calculate marginal cost it is a more hands-on report where you can model best-case, moderate, and worst-case scenarios.
These tools help provide you the insight and confidence around what’s available to be spent and when. Our work and service scope spans many industries and functions across the company, employing specialists in a wide range of professions. Whatever your life’s goals, you’ll find rewards here that go far beyond financial.
Accounting Manager, Global Financial Accounting & Controls
Enterprise-level tools to improve profitability and fuel multi-brand growth. Even if it is only 5% of your total sales, having a Shopify store and/or selling on additional channels diversifies your revenue streams. However, when it comes to taxes, it is generally better to be safe than sorry. If you can figure out what caused the spike in sales, you can then double down on what’s working.
A detailed guide to building financial performance dashboards for your eCommerce business
I also notice that the return rate for for this product is less than 5%. That tells me that customers are overwhelmingly happy with the product, and the supplier quality is on point. However, this is a useful piece of data to use when negotiating with my supplier. I will probably ask my supplier for 5% more units in the next shipment, free of charge, to cover quality-related returns. This way they can help not only file your taxes, but also set up the necessary goals, objectives, systems, and provide proactive insights to key tax-savings strategies. For example, if you notice a big surge in new sales in the month of July, you’ll want to lean in and figure out what caused that.
Want to make sure that you’re making the most of your FBA store finances? Here is our Amazon Accounting guide.
The P&L statement gave me the information that I needed to make a decision about the future of this product. I will definitely invest in another batch of inventory and continue to build this brand. We recommend customizing your charts of accounts during the initial setup and onboarding. It is just about categorizing all of your transactions on a regular basis – say weekly or monthly.
This way, you have defined categories that show where you are spending your money. The accounting equation is a simple way to understand financial position and how the components on a balance sheet relate to each other. The accounting equation varies slightly depending on the structure of your business entity. When you set up inventory accounting properly and keep an up-to-date balance sheet, you can make decisions based on the data instead of going off intuition. You will also have the data available to back up requests to suppliers for preferential pricing or terms on future purchases.
- This doesn’t account for all of the additional expenses incurred with full-time employees, like payroll taxes, paid sick leave, benefits, etc.
- We help our customers with cost control, financial planning, and strategy.
- Here is an example structure of simple Cash Flow statement for an FBA business.
Tip – Fetcher has a daily inventory tracker and projection tool on accounts payable ledger the dashboard page. Download our ecommerce accounting tool kit and learn how to build a financial system to scale your business beyond 7 figures. You will also have the business intelligence to review what products are selling profitably, which benefit from paid acquisition, and clearly know how much money is on hand to pay yourself at the end of each month.
