Ecommerce bookkeeping: the document checklist

Ecommerce books have one structural problem: the platform is the source of truth and the bank is not. A single payout can cover several days of orders across multiple payment methods, net of processing fees, refunds, chargebacks, advertising costs and platform commission. Booking payouts as sales makes revenue, fees and sales tax all wrong at once.

The second problem is that money moving through the platform is not always a sale. Accounts receivable payments, layby or layaway instalments, gift card redemptions and store credit all flow through the same pipe.

Request every month

Platform reports are the core of this list; the bank statements are almost a formality by comparison.

• Platform settlement or payout reports (Shopify, Amazon, Etsy, eBay, WooCommerce) with fee detail
• Gross sales report by period, showing discounts, refunds and shipping charged separately
• Sales tax collected by jurisdiction
• Payment processor statements (Stripe, PayPal, Shopify Payments) showing gross and fees
• Chargeback and dispute reports
• Advertising invoices — platform ads, Meta, Google — especially where netted off payouts
• Bank statements for every account
• Credit card statements
• Supplier and inventory purchase invoices, with freight and duty
• Third-party logistics and fulfilment invoices, including storage fees
• Returns and refunds detail
• Gift card and store credit issued and redeemed

Request quarterly or annually

• Quarterly: sales tax filings by state or jurisdiction, reconciled to platform tax collected.
• Quarterly or annually: inventory count or closing stock valuation — get a real number, not an estimate, if the client sells physical goods.
• Annually: 1099-K reconciliation against booked revenue.
• Annually: supplier statements to confirm year-end payables.
• Annually: W-9s for contractors, designers and freelancers.

Ask before you onboard

These are the questions that decide whether you have priced the engagement correctly. Ask them on the first call, not in month three.

• Which sales channels, and do they all pay into the same bank account?
• Which payment processors, and are any fees netted off before deposit?
• Do you hold inventory, and do you count it? When did you last count?
• Cash or accrual, and does your tax preparer expect COGS tracked properly?
• Where are you registered for sales tax, and who files?
• Do you sell gift cards or issue store credit?
• Do you use a 3PL, and does it charge storage separately?
• Are ad spend and platform fees being deducted from payouts?

Traps that catch bookkeepers new to ecommerce

A customer called "Shopify" with a growing receivable. A very common inherited mess: someone raised a monthly invoice to a fake "Shopify" customer and never cleared it. The balance builds forever. Fix it with a clearing account approach and write the old balance off properly rather than adding to it.

Store credit netted to zero. Store credit redeemed as a discount makes a sale disappear — revenue $X less discount $X equals nothing. If the credit was booked as a liability when issued, redemption should draw that liability down at full revenue. Gift cards usually get this treatment; store credit often falls through the cracks.

Sales tax treated as income. Tax collected is a liability. Platforms increasingly remit marketplace facilitator tax themselves, which means some tax collected never reaches the client's bank at all — and needs different treatment from the tax they remit.

COGS with no inventory count. If the client cannot give you a closing stock figure, say so explicitly in what you hand the tax preparer. Estimating COGS from sold-order reports and product cost data is workable, but the limitation needs to be documented, not buried.

Not every deposit is a sale. Accounts receivable payments, layaway instalments and deposits on future orders all move through the same payment platform. Separate them at the report stage — reviewing thousands of individual orders later is not a viable plan.