Keeping Records from ebay sales...

Charliecat

Have sold the contents of my house on ebay, want to buy to sell now, not pallet loads, just bits and bobs.
How do I got about keeping records, and how do you work out how much the packaging has cost etc? Any advice would be much appreciated.

windswept

there is no need to keep records of costs for every single individual sale, just keep your postal receipts and total them up weekly or monthly, I find doing speadsheets etc. tedious beyond belief so I have an accounts book for small businesses, where you enter the weekly totals for all expenses and sales, it has a section at the back for entering totals and it's easy at the end of the tax year to find your amounts. as long as you know your turnover (sales incl. postage) and your expenses (costs of sales, packaging, postage and all other essential costs), then you are set for your tax return.
for example , on monthly totals : turnover £500
minus expenses of : cost of sales £200 (what you paid for you stock that has sold).
minus postage £30
minus ebay and paypal fees £70
equals profit of £200.
if you did that for a year, your profit would be £2400, your turnover £6000, but to arrive at your taxable profit you deduct all other expenses such as the total of packaging supplies you bought during the year, plus consumables like printer ink and paper, in fact if you bought anything to do with your business, it goes as an expense. Just remember that even if you have a garage full of stock, you only count it as an expense when it has sold. I keep a runnning total of my costs of sales, I have a book specifically for this purpose, but you could keep a spreadsheet and do it that way, it makes stocktaking a lot easier as you know the figure you are aiming for beforehand.
I used to print off copies of ebay sales invoices but afte only 6 months trading I had a box full! now I download the monthly ebay sales history onto a spreadsheet and edit it so all you get are the relevant amounts, the same with paypal fees, it means you only have a few sheets of paper a month instead of dozens.
as long as you have good records that is all that matters, my accounting ways are probably far removed from what an accountant would recognise, but the figures add up and it works for me.

Charliecat

Thanks ever so much...now...How do i download the sale sheet from ebay? <<<thicko alert>>>

windswept

I think you have to have selling manager and then in seller tools you have a file management centre, you just select your dates and they email you when the report is ready, I have also subscribed to sales reports, but they dont seem to be much use, it is free though.
I have to download the info on my upstairs pc, on there it automatically goes into excel format, for some weird reason, if I download it onto my laptop, it comes up in another format and then I can't change it into excel as the laptop isn't connected to a printer.

Charliecat

Oh right...will have to have a fiddle with that then:) I take it the cost of shop/selling manager is expenses? Thanks for your time windswept:)

windswept

selling manager is free, a shop is £6 a month, it's cheaper to list but much higher fvf's, a shop is only useful if you have lots of different lines, I used to have as many shop sales as BIN's, but shop visibilty is so down that only 20% of sales are now from my shop.

snowwhite_2

quote= Just remember that even if you have a garage full of stock, you only count it as an expense when it has sold. .[/QUOTE]

Don't understand what you mean by this????

Graham_Devon

snowwhite wrote: »

quote= Just remember that even if you have a garage full of stock, you only count it as an expense when it has sold. .

Don't understand what you mean by this????[/QUOTE]

Until you have sold an item, it's a company asset, not an expense.

windswept

you only work out your cost of sales at the end of the tax year, (although I keep a running total), you total up what you have spent on stock during the year, i.e. if it's your 1st year , your opening stock is zero.
say you spend £2000 on stock, then you sell half of it , the amount that goes as expenses is £1000. you then have £1000 opening stock for the next year. ( I am talking about the very short tax return for t/o below £15k).
It helps to know cost of sales when working out your profit margins too.
for example, my best seller is £14.90 including postage on ebay, the trade cost (cost of sale) is £5.00, the actual postage is £1.84, the fees from ebay/paypal are around £2.00. so the net profit is £6 .
Of course that is a very simplistic way of looking at it, there are all sorts of variables like all other expenses, unsold items impact on profit, as do merchant fees, the more expenses you have, the less tax you will pay, but the profit will be less too.

Charliecat

How exactly does that work then? I will have an ivoice for say £1000 on my expenses for Rubber duckys say.... and I have 50 left by the end of the year.
Ive already sold 400, that on my money coming in sheet..
So simply i have £1000 on my expenses and they sold for £2456 and thats on my money coming in sheet the postage cost etc is on my expenses. But I still have 100 to sell.............where do I put that...or do I not put the £1000 in as an expense till its sold..???Am I making sense ?

Charliecat

Ignore my post, ive confused myself reading it back...lol