E-commerce accounting service. Settlements reconciled, tax filed.

An e-commerce accounting service reconciles marketplace and payment settlements back to the bank, separates fees, refunds and facilitator tax from revenue, values inventory, files sales tax and VAT wherever you have a registration, and reports contribution margin by channel and SKU. It runs monthly, on a fixed fee.

This page describes the work, how it is delivered and what it costs. If you are looking at the sector rather than the service, the problems online brands run into and the benchmarks they measure themselves against are on our e-commerce accountants industry page, and the platform-specific views are on Shopify accounting and Amazon FBA accounting.

E-commerce bookkeeping looks like normal bookkeeping until you scratch the surface. Then the differences appear: marketplace facilitator sales tax sitting inside settlement statements, refunds and chargebacks landing weeks after the original sale, Amazon FBA inventory adjustments that don't reconcile to your warehouse count, multi-currency Shopify payments arriving with fees and FX baked in, returns reserves required under proper revenue recognition, advertising cost-of-goods classification arguments. Most generalist accountants get at least two of these wrong.

We've built specific playbooks for each major platform. For Shopify, A2X (or equivalent) sits between Shopify Payments and Xero or QuickBooks, cleanly separating revenue, sales tax, fees and refunds. For Amazon FBA, settlement statements are imported and reconciled to deposits, with FBA fees, storage, advertising and inventory adjustments split out properly. For Stripe, balance transactions are reconciled to your bank net of fees.

On top of platform reconciliation, e-commerce brands face complex sales tax positions. We track economic nexus across US states, register and file where required (typically via Avalara or TaxJar), handle UK MTD VAT including the OSS and IOSS schemes for EU sales, and manage UAE and other jurisdictions where you have a tax presence.

For brands operating real inventory (rather than print-on-demand or dropshipping), we account for stock under IAS 2 (UK / IFRS) or ASC 330 (US), including cost flow methods, inventory write-downs and the freight-in capitalisation rules that move materially. Done well, this gives you defensible gross margins; done badly, it makes your reporting noise.

And on top of all that, we run the unit economics. Customer acquisition cost by channel, contribution margin by SKU and product line, lifetime value cohorts, true gross margin after returns and replacements. The metrics that should drive e-commerce decisions but rarely surface from a generic chart of accounts.

How the engagement is delivered. Onboarding runs three to four weeks: week one is platform and bank access plus a settlement history pull, week two rebuilds the chart of accounts so revenue, discounts, shipping income, fees and facilitator tax each have their own line, week three sets up the settlement connector and reconciles one historic month end to end as a proof, week four cuts over. From then on the monthly cycle is fixed: settlements imported and matched by day two, inventory and cost of goods by day three, sales tax and VAT positions checked by day four, pack and margin report issued by the fifth business day.

What the fee covers and what it does not. The service fee covers the reconciliation work, the returns and the reporting. Connector subscriptions (A2X or equivalent), sales tax automation (Avalara or TaxJar) and the accounting software licence are billed by those vendors directly and stay in your name, so you keep the accounts if you leave. Registration in a new state or country is quoted per registration because the work is per registration. Current fee bands are on the fixed-fee pricing page, and scope is defined in our standard engagement terms.

The rules the treatment has to satisfy are not ours. Inventory is measured at the lower of cost and net realisable value under IAS 2, or ASC 330 for a US-reporting entity, which is what decides whether inbound freight and duty are capitalised into stock or expensed as incurred. UK VAT registration is compulsory once taxable turnover passes £90,000 in a rolling 12 months, and returns are filed through Making Tax Digital software. In the US there is no federal sales tax: each state sets its own economic nexus test, commonly $100,000 of sales, and marketplace facilitator rules mean Amazon may already be collecting on your behalf in a state where you still have a filing obligation. The UAE Federal Tax Authority applies VAT at 5 percent above AED 375,000 of taxable supplies.

A worked example of why settlement-level accounting matters. A brand with $180,000 of gross monthly sales across Shopify and Amazon sees roughly $142,000 hit the bank. Booking the deposit as revenue understates sales by $38,000 and hides every component of the gap: marketplace commission, payment processing, FBA fulfilment and storage, advertising, refunds, chargebacks and the facilitator tax the platform already remitted. Split properly, the same month shows a channel whose contribution margin is 9 points below the other, which is a decision. Booked as one deposit, it shows nothing.

The service assumes the underlying ledger is being kept, which is cloud bookkeeping, and it pairs with the VAT, GST and tax compliance service for the filings themselves. Where the books are already behind, the catch-up bookkeeping service comes first. Brands weighing a US entity for a Shopify store should read US accounting services alongside company incorporation. The account structure we use is written out in our Shopify and Amazon FBA chart of accounts, and multi-currency treatment in multi-currency accounting for SMEs. This service sits beside the rest of our full list of accounting services, and most sellers pair it with bookkeeping and tax filing from the same list.