E-commerce
Alpine Accounts provides bookkeeping and management accounts for Australian e-commerce businesses selling through Shopify, Amazon, eBay, Etsy and their own sites. The distinctive problems are payment gateway reconciliation, where the money that lands in the bank is net of fees, refunds and chargebacks and rarely matches the sales figure, inventory and cost of goods accuracy, and GST treatment across domestic and export sales. The work is about making the platform data, the payment data and the accounting file agree.
The settlement reconciliation problem
An online store sells one hundred dollars and receives ninety seven, three days later, batched with other orders, net of fees, minus a refund from last week and a chargeback from last month. Coding the deposit as revenue is wrong, and it is what most e-commerce files do.
Done properly, gross sales, platform fees, payment processing fees, refunds and chargebacks are each recorded separately and reconciled to the settlement. Only then does the gross margin figure mean anything.
Inventory and true margin
Cost of goods has to include landed cost, not just the supplier invoice. Freight, duty, and for imports the exchange rate actually achieved, all sit in the product cost. Businesses that skip this consistently overstate margin and discover the problem when cash does not behave the way the profit and loss suggested it would.
Where a business holds stock across multiple channels or warehouses, the count and the accounting need to stay in step, otherwise cost of goods becomes a year end guess.
GST across channels
Domestic sales, exports, low value imported goods and marketplace collected GST all behave differently. Keeping the records in a shape where each stream is separately identifiable is what makes the compliance position defensible later.
Common questions
Which platforms do you work with?
Shopify, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, WooCommerce and Square, reconciled into Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks Online, typically with an integration handling the transaction volume.
Can you fix a file where deposits were coded straight to sales?
Yes. It is one of the most common e-commerce cleanups. The prior periods get restated so fees, refunds and chargebacks are separated out, and the gross margin becomes real.
Do you handle multi currency?
Yes. Multi currency sales and purchases are recorded with realised and unrealised gains treated correctly, which matters for importers whose true cost moves with the exchange rate.