Accountancy Software Recommendation for eCommerce Business

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Hi,

I’m currently trying to find a piece of Accountancy Software to suit our needs and, in all honesty, I’m overwhelmed with the choices available due to the fact that, although a moderate size, our company hasn’t used any ‘real’ Accounting Software in the past. I was hoping that I could tell you a little bit about our business and you could, in return, let me know whether my goals are realistic.

We trade on Amazon, eBay, Play and our own website which is running on OS Commerce. We also have two physical stores. At present all orders from these systems / stores are loaded in to an OS Commerce database for processing and we dispatch around £3,000,000 worth of orders a year.

At present we perform a dump of the orders once a quarter from OS Commerce and the total is entered in to a fairly elaborate Excel Spreadsheet. I then go through our bank and credit card statements to ensure that we have every invoice accounted for and these invoices also get entered in to the Excel Spreadsheet. Fortunately we only have a handful of suppliers and most of them provide month end statements which can then just be entered in to the spreadsheet as one transaction so this doesn’t take long.

Essentially, the VAT payable is 20% of the total of orders minus the purchases (obviously also accounting for zero rated invoices, orders sent to VAT registered businesses abroad and VAT reclaimed on goods imported from outside the EU). The process works fairly effectively, is typically very accurate and almost painless however I am conscious of the fact that it is a little bit ‘Mickey Mouse’. HMRC would not approve and typically it causes confusion at the year end when my accountant has to go through the VAT returns manually and double check everything.

My main sticking point so far has been that when trialling accounting software that I can’t get my head around how we would import the orders from our eCommerce platform in to the software and reconcile the orders with the funds incoming. I believe that I could take our existing CSV dump from OS Commerce and import in to several accountancy packages or alternatively software such as CarryTheOne and OneSaas would be able to do it on the fly. My issue at this early state is more from a reconciliation perspective - We are talking around 200 orders a day which can be paid by Cash, Amazon, Account (via a factoring company), Cheque, Play, Credit Card, Debit Card, PayPal or BACS. A few of these payment methods take a commission at source and so the payments in to the bank wouldn’t necessarily correspond exactly with the invoices imported. As such, I’m not too sure how we would easily and quickly reconcile the orders we import against the payments received from all these payment methods.

In an ideal world we would:

-              Import all dispatched orders in to the accountancy software, and set them all as paid (without having to reconcile against multiple payment methods). We are aware that every payment set to ‘dispatched’ has been paid for by one of the above methods and will be banked accordingly. I don’t want to use the software for invoicing as our eCommerce system already deals with that.

-              Import a CSV of our bank and credit card statements and tie up each and every transaction against physical paper invoices or expenses.

-              Work out the VAT and year-end corporation tax figures

Is the above realistic? At the moment my VAT returns take me a couple of evenings every three months and I want to make sure that moving over to accounting software doesn’t result in having to spend several hours a week reconciling payments and double entering data.

Any advice you could give would be very much appreciated. Please be gentle with me as I know that the questions I'm asking are probably ridiculous. I am also aware that the Excel file that we've been doing isn't acceptable for a company of our size and I should have moved over ages ago!

Thanks again.

Chris

Replies (5)

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By 3569787
03rd May 2016 16:26

No straight answer I'm afraid!

;

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By J T
24th Jul 2014 12:45

Xero or Accountsportal

I was looking into something similar for small organisations who did their own accounts and weren't working with an accountant.

I will say is that it is harder to do accounts right than the bodge (no offence intended - we all bodge things from time to time) you have above. You need to be aware it takes time (yours or an administrator/bookkeeper). The benefit is:

- very useful management information

- cost control (not paying duplicated invoices etc.)

- professional reports (for the bank, selling your company etc)

The advantage of the subscription based cloud computing is they come with free support and if you don't like them you move to another. I liked both:

 - Xero, which did everything we needed to and you could easily run a multi-million pound company on, while still being pretty easy to use. £20 pcm from memory

 - AccountsPortal which had some limitations but was even more user friendly and cheaper.

Cash reconciling should be easy but time consuming if you can't create rules (Xero lets you but investigate). Your ecommerce report should have the payment date so all you need to do is match them off

On importing the data both the above can be pretty clever, as 35697877 implies, the issue is more likely to be with your ecommerce reports. If they can produce something with set columns and ID references you shuld be fine. Be aware it won't be the accounts packages fault, I have worked with multi-million pound sales systems that still produce reports that don't inmport or add up.

You mention you have an accountant, so asking them what they like for similar clients is a good start. If they are a partner they can also get you a discount.

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By bocsta
24th Jul 2014 13:11

Xero Integration

Xero has a truck load of integration with online sales

http://www.xero.com/uk/add-ons/ecommerce/

Only wish we sold online!

 

 

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By Brend201
24th Jul 2014 16:39

Slightly off-topic - VAT

I suspect that the earlier replies regarding Xero may well be the best suggestions that you will get.  Regarding your accountants, I fear that they may not know more than you already know!  In my experience, accounting firms tend to think in terms of the big names but don't know very much about the kind of operational intricacies that you clearly have.  

Now to digress slightly.  You mention that you pay VAT at 20% and adjust your VAT liability for orders sent to VAT registered businesses abroad.  If you are mainly a B2C business, have you thought about the distance selling regulations?  These require you to register in other EU countries is your sales into any of those countries exceed the VAT threshold for any one.  If that needs to be done, that introduces a whole new set of accounting complexity that is less easily resolved but worth checking the various Xero add-ons for.  

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By raybackler
05th Aug 2014 07:05

Liberty Accounts might do the job

We use Liberty for an e commerce client.  Their software reports from their online system split the sales by VAT code and this data is imported via the bank accounts.  Also, Liberty has integration with Paypay so it deals with commission deductions from payments.

Liberty also has a stock control system so if you wanted to do the full integration then this may also be possible.

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