Virtual Accounting Services – BUILT just for eCommerce!
Done-for-you bookkeeping for your online store – Shopify, Etsy, Amazon, WooCommerce.
Want to do virtually no bookkeeping for your online store? 5-Gen your books!
Why 5-Gen?
Kind of like 5G for cellular – leveled up bookkeeping.
eCommerce is:
- Large volumes of sales and fees
- Quick inventory turnover
- Sales tax all over the map
- All happening in a flash online
Traditional accounting methods can’t scale efficiently to this challenge.
Keep scrolling to learn more …
A new generation of bookkeeping, optimized for eCommerce, is here!
Get 
Click the books to shop plans
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How can I tell if my bookkeeping is not optimized for eCommerce?
Some red flags:
Detailed individual sales listed in your revenue account in QuickBooks.
Sales platform (Shopify) and payment gateways (PayPal) directly connected to your QuickBooks.
= data dump overload = duplicated money items in, mismatched entries = overstated net income = paying taxes you shouldn’t owe.
Inventory purchases entered directly into cost of goods account in QuickBooks but not regularly moved into the inventory asset account based on physical counts.
= understated asset values = margins from sales channel do not match QuickBooks margins (unless your stock sells out instantaneously) = faulty data = bad business decisions.
Reconciliation is a disaster. The above practices make it very difficult to reconcile monthly. So you either don’t do it, or pay someone to look through a lot of entries trying to match bulk deposits to individual sales.
= more room for errors = you can’t prove your numbers = inaccurate reporting = more bad business decisions based on unreliable numbers
…
Bookkeeping. Retooled.
5-Gen Books works with summaries of eCommerce transactions in your accounting software and uses a unique approach to reconciling. This means much of the detailed accounting work occurs outside your QuickBooks (or Xero or ___). Reports of the detailed items are generated and curated. Summaries are transferred into various special accounts into QuickBooks on a periodic basis. This scares traditional accountants – how can you reconcile in bulk? Don’t you need to match individual transactions? We have our ways.
So what’s the big deal about reconciling accounts? What is reconciliation anyway?
Reconciling an account (like your checkbook) means going through a methodical exercise to double-check entries for errors, duplicates or missing items. This is somewhat automatic for regular bank feeds within accounting software. To do it by hand, you check off the list of entries in your books against the bank statement and compare the beginning and ending balances. Verification and cross-checking are safe practices built into accounting systems to make the numbers reliable. So reconciling accounts is instrumental to keeping accurate records and why accountants talk about it so much. And commonly what amateur bookkeepers skip over.
Reconciling can be difficult with e-commerce accounts. Individual order payments arrive in somewhat random batches as combined deposits. So in this case, in order to reconcile, you are comparing information between the deposit account and the sales report, and summaries to individual line items. It is important to do this not only to make sure you got paid for all that you sold, but also to end up with a report to prove where your numbers came from if the IRS comes knocking.
How 5-Gen Books works with you virtually:
Accounting Software
We use QuickBooks Onlline. You ask “Is QuickBooks the best software for eCommerce?” What you really are asking – Which accounting software will completely automate bookkeeping for my online store? There isn’t one, unfortunately. We find that a reasonably good accounting app like QuickBooks is the base of a strategic system of technology and humans while we are waiting for the one app to rule them all. 5-Gen Books services – the closest you can get to having it all handled for you.
Strategic Tech Stack
We use various other apps and systems, some of which will need your own subscription. We do not directly connect your e-commerce accounts to QuickBooks (why not? see above). We use other third party integration apps. We also generally require you to subscribe to apps to manage inventory and sales tax. Accounting software was not built to handle e-commerce inventory (paid up front, no invoicing), or multi-state sales tax. Remitting multi-state sales taxes is costly, an app may be best.
Communication
We provide virtual services and so all communication is online and paper is digitized. You need to be good with email, chat, and video conferencing and other online tech. You will provide your own sharable document storage app so that your records stay your property. We like google workspace. Since the world still uses paper receipts and bills, you will need to scan any of these items we need and send them to us either by email or shared folders. Send us your records and we do the rest!
Doing it yourself but sales have grown fast (yay!) and it is a mess?
Just Quit the accounting gig!
gets your numbers in a row for you. Click the books. Done.
Laura Viola has been great. She is so detailed, helped me set up all my sku’s for my products and has really kept me on track on keeping up with sending her paperwork so I’m not behind when tax season comes. Also, she’s been instrumental in helping me get expenses figured out as well!
Thank you Laura!
Jaima Emmert
Daisy Bennett LLC
Accounts
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