Shopify accountants for growing DTC brands.

Shopify accountants rebuild gross sales from order data rather than from the payout, because a Shopify Payments deposit arrives net of processing fees, refunds, chargebacks and any Shopify Capital repayment. Reconciling the store to the ledger means matching orders to payouts to the bank, in that direction, every single day the store trades.

Shopify-native brands have particular accounting needs that off-the-shelf bookkeeping misses. Shopify Payments deposits arrive net of fees, refunds, chargebacks and disputes, but proper accounting needs all four separated. Multi-currency Shopify stores see settlements in the customer's currency and your bank in your home currency, with FX gains and losses at the boundary. International sales hit OSS / IOSS rules for EU and import VAT regimes elsewhere.

We use A2X (or its equivalents) as the central reconciliation engine. Settlement statements from Shopify Payments are imported daily and matched to bank deposits. Sales, refunds, shipping income, gift-card liabilities and discounts are split into clean accounts. Multi-currency settlement creates separate FX revaluation entries handled under your reporting GAAP.

For DTC brands operating real inventory, we account for stock at the SKU level under IAS 2 or ASC 330. Returns reserves estimated based on 90-day rolling return rates. Marketplace fees (where you sell through Faire, Amazon or Etsy alongside Shopify) tracked separately.

On the tax side, we handle the full stack (UK MTD VAT, EU OSS/IOSS, US multi-state economic nexus, UAE FTA), depending on where you sell and where you're registered.

A payout is a settlement, not a sales figure. Inside a single deposit sit captured order value, processing fees per transaction, refunds issued that day, chargebacks and chargeback fees, any reserve the processor is holding, and, for stores using Shopify Capital, an automatic percentage repayment taken before the money moves. Book the deposit as revenue and you lose all of it: turnover is understated, payment costs vanish, and the finance cost of Capital is invisible. The fix is to post gross order value as revenue, then each deduction to its own account, with the net figure agreeing to the bank to the penny.

Multi-currency stores add a second layer. Shopify Markets prices in local currency and settles in the store's payout currency, so every order carries a conversion at Shopify's rate on the day, and the ledger needs the transaction currency, the presentment currency and the resulting exchange difference kept apart. If they are collapsed into one figure, margin by market becomes unreadable and the foreign exchange gain or loss ends up buried inside the sales line. Third-party payment gateways, Shop Pay Installments and buy-now-pay-later providers settle on their own timetables, which means several reconciliations rather than one.

Two balances are routinely misstated. Gift cards and store credit are a liability until redeemed, not revenue on sale, and a growing store can carry a material unredeemed balance it has already spent. Returns are the other: recording refunds only when issued flatters a strong trading month and punishes the one that absorbs the returns, so a reserve based on the store's own rolling return rate belongs in the accounts, not in a spreadsheet.

Tax follows the stock and the customer. Distance selling into the EU runs through the One Stop Shop, imports at or below 150 euros through the Import One Stop Shop, and UK registration is governed by the threshold explained in HMRC's VAT registration guidance. Selling into the United States is a nexus question rather than a threshold question, only partly harmonised by the Streamlined Sales Tax Governing Board and covered on our US accounting page. Brands selling on marketplaces as well should read our Amazon FBA accountants page, and the ledger design behind both sits in our Shopify and Amazon chart of accounts guide. The monthly work behind all of this is our e-commerce accounting service, and the sales tax and VAT filings that come out of it run through our VAT, GST and tax compliance service. Every other service we offer is listed in our directory of SME accounting services.