ACCOUNTING AND ADMINISTRATION

The administration. Something a lot of people get nervous about. So did we, which is why we initially looked for bookkeepers. Because it’s pretty pricey to have one, we chose to do it ourselves. At least the first period. Soon we found out Amazon conducts a lot of transactions, making your accounting very complex faster than you expect. Fortunately, we found a solution: we automated our accounting! In this article you can read how we came to this idea.

AUTOMATION

Every month, Amazon transfers you an amount based on your sales and fees paid to Amazon. Instead of billing you for every cost item, they settle everything at once. Useful, but this implies in your accounting you need to split the costs yourself. What is more, Amazon does this separately for each country. And country-by-country means different VAT rates! In Seller Central you do not get a very clear overview, so this had really cost us a lot of time. So much time it made us switch to A2X Accounting. An application that automatically retrieves all your earnings and expenses from Amazon and then structures them precisely. Afterwards, A2X can forward it to your accounting. Unfortunately, you cannot use it with any accounting software, but it does work with Xero and Quickbooks. That is why we went to investigate Xero.

XERO

A complete accounting program that automatically receives your Amazon transactions via A2X. And is integrated with Revolut and PayPal. And can work with 5 different currencies. What does that mean? No longer sifting through Amazon’s payment overviews. Transactions via Revolut and PayPal automatically in your accounting. No need to check yourself if the dollar was at £ 0.72 or £ 0.76 during that one transaction to China. When we started using Xero and A2x we made a huge leap in terms of efficiency! 

Think about what accounting program you are going to work with before you start selling. And don’t forget to think about the future too! 

In the article on A2X, we take a closer look at the use of A2X.