Ecommerce Bookkeeping and Accounting for Multi-Channel Sellers

Stock you buy is an asset until it sells. The moment it sells, its cost belongs to the same month as the revenue it produced. Where that match does not happen, a heavy restock month shows a loss and the next month shows a margin that cannot be real.

We hold SKU-level costs, release them to COGS as units sell, and carry the remainder on the balance sheet. Landed cost sits in the unit, so freight, duties, tariffs and inbound fulfillment fees are not buried in operating expenses where they flatter your gross margin.

That is what makes margin by SKU and by channel usable. You can see which products carry the account and which are subsidized by the rest.

Onboarding starts with your actual channel mix, not a generic checklist. We connect your marketplaces, carts and payment processors through purpose-built ecommerce connectors such as A2X or Link My Books, map every transaction type to the right account, and reconcile your history back to clean opening balances.

Once the file is current, the cycle repeats. Settlements post as summarized entries that tie to your deposits rather than thousands of individual orders. COGS is matched to units sold, accruals are booked, and a licensed accountant reviews the close before anything reaches you.

Your delivery date is set at onboarding and does not move. Ecommerce closes are gated by channel settlement timing, so we fix the date against your slowest reporting channel rather than an optimistic one.

Marketplace facilitator laws are in force in every US state with a statewide sales tax and in Washington DC, so Amazon, Etsy, eBay, Walmart and TikTok Shop collect and remit on the sales they facilitate. Most sellers stop reading there.

Three exposures remain. Your own storefront is yours, so Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce and direct wholesale carry your collection obligation wherever you have nexus. Marketplace sales often still count toward your own economic nexus calculation, commonly $100,000 of sales into a state, which can create a registration requirement on revenue you never collected tax on. And FBA inventory stored in a state can establish physical presence there.

We track sales by state against current thresholds, separate marketplace-collected tax from tax you owe directly, and tell you where to register before a state finds you.

If you hold stock, the answer is accrual. Under the cash method, inventory is expensed when you pay the supplier, so the month you restock shows a collapsed margin and the month you sell shows an inflated one. Neither number tells you what to charge.

Smaller sellers below the IRS gross receipts threshold may be permitted to use the cash method for tax purposes. That is a filing choice, not a reason to run the business on cash basis books. We set every inventory-carrying client up on accrual.

Behind is the most common state we find sellers in, and it compounds. You cannot price without margin data, you cannot file without books, and you cannot fix either while new orders keep arriving.

Catch up runs as a standalone project, priced separately from the monthly fee. We scope the backlog first, then rebuild history channel by channel using the same connectors and mapping we will use going forward, so nothing is redone later. You get reconciled prior periods, a corrected inventory position, and a written summary of what was wrong and what changed.

Standard financials tell you whether the business made money. These tell you where it came from and which channel is carrying the others.

• Gross Merchandise Value
• Net Revenue after platform fees, refunds and chargebacks
• Revenue by Sales Channel
• Revenue by Traffic Source
• Average Order Value
• Cost of Goods Sold
• Gross Margin by SKU and by channel
• Contribution Margin after fulfillment and advertising
• Customer Acquisition Cost
• Customer Lifetime Value and the CLV to CAC ratio
• Refund and Return Rate
• Inventory Turnover and Days Inventory Outstanding
• Earnings Before Interest and Taxes

Sellers buy reliability, so the timelines matter more than the feature list.

Whether or not you pick Monily, six things separate a specialist from a generalist with a website.

• The connector: Ask which ecommerce connector they use and to see a sample settlement entry. A2X and Link My Books are the standard. A raw platform feed that dumps individual orders into the ledger cannot be reconciled to a payout.
• Their accrual position: Ask directly whether they put inventory on the balance sheet. If the answer is that either method works, they do not handle inventory sellers.
• Fee separation: Ask how many Amazon fee types they code separately. If fees arrive as one lump, you will never see unit economics.
• Sales tax scope: Ask whether nexus tracking is included or billed separately, and whether they monitor it between closes or once a year.
• The delivery date: Vague answers about being responsive are worth nothing in April. Get a date.
• Catch up terms: Ask whether the backlog is quoted before work starts and whether the rebuild uses the same mapping as the ongoing close. If not, it gets redone.

Read-only access to your sales channels, payment processors, and bank and credit card accounts. Your existing books, in whatever condition they are in. Current SKU costs, including landed cost if you import.

One standard is not negotiable. Business and personal spending have to run through separate accounts. Commingled accounts cannot produce reliable margin data, and reconstructing them spends budget better spent on the books themselves. If yours are still mixed, we will help you separate them before the first close.

• A channel deposit is a net figure. Until it is split by fee type, your revenue line is wrong.
• If you hold inventory, cash basis will misstate your margin every month.
• Marketplace facilitator laws do not close your sales tax question. Your own storefront and your own nexus calculation remain yours.
• Catch up is a separate project from a monthly close, and it should be quoted before it starts.
• A fixed delivery date is worth more than a promise to be responsive.