Bookkeeping for E-Commerce Brands
Shopify shows a deposit, Stripe already took its cut, Amazon settled net of eleven kinds of fees, and somewhere in there is your actual gross margin. Most e-commerce books record the deposit and call it a day, which is how a brand can grow fast and run out of cash at the same time. We record the whole story — fees, COGS, inventory, and all.
The deposit is not the revenue, and the revenue is not the margin
Every channel pays you net of its own fees — processing, marketplace commission, fulfillment, ads deducted at the source. Book the bank deposit as revenue and you've quietly understated both sales and expenses, and your gross margin is fiction. Recording gross sales and every fee category separately is the only way to see what a sale actually earns.
Then there's inventory, the thing that eats all your cash and hides on the balance sheet. COGS has to move with what actually sold, not what you spent on the last container. Get that wrong and a profitable-looking month is really you converting cash into boxes in a warehouse.
What clean e-commerce books actually tell you
Recorded right, you finally get true gross margin by channel, real contribution after ad spend, and a cash picture that accounts for the inventory you're about to reorder. That's the difference between scaling and just buying more stock on a credit card.
It also keeps the tax people calm. Sales-tax nexus follows your sales into states you've never visited, and clean books make that trackable instead of a year-end panic.
How Kaizen runs it
We run QuickBooks Online with the connectors that pull Shopify, Amazon, and Stripe detail into clean entries — gross sales, fees, refunds, and COGS where they belong — plus Ramp for cards and Gusto for payroll. Then a documented month-end close lands on the same date every month with the same reports.
We're named after kaizen, continuous improvement, which for a brand means each close reconciles the channels a little tighter and catches the fee category that drifted before it becomes a quarter-sized surprise. Methodical, on purpose.
What's included
- Channel revenue recorded gross, with processor and marketplace fees split out
- Bank, card, and payout reconciliations — Shopify, Amazon, Stripe, PayPal
- COGS and inventory tracked so margin reflects what actually sold
- Refunds, chargebacks, and returns booked, not buried
- Ad-spend visibility so contribution margin is real, not gross-of-marketing
- Sales-tax nexus tracking as you sell into new states
- 1099 tracking for contractors and filing at year-end
- Monthly data-quality scan — uncategorized, unreconciled, imbalanced items flagged early
Pricing
Straight answers
Do you handle Shopify, Amazon, and Stripe settlements?
Yes — that's the core of e-commerce bookkeeping. We record gross sales and split out every fee and refund per channel, then reconcile to the actual payouts, so margin is real.
How do you handle inventory and COGS?
COGS moves with what sold, and inventory sits on the balance sheet where it belongs. That's what stops a 'profitable' month from secretly being cash turned into warehouse stock.
Can you help with sales tax?
We track nexus as you sell into new states and keep the data clean for filing. For high-volume multi-state, we coordinate with a sales-tax specialist — we won't pretend to be one.
Do I need this yet, or just a bookkeeper?
Pre-revenue or single-channel with tidy books, a bookkeeper is enough — we'll say so. Once you're multi-channel with real inventory and ad spend, blended books hide exactly the numbers you need.
Related
Free 20-minute books assessment
We'll show you the five things we'd fix first in your books — useful whether you hire us, hire someone, or do neither.
Talk to SalesOr call us directly: +1 786 789 0969