Working on accounts for eBay managed payments

ballisticbrian

Happy New Year!
Just working on accounts for when eBay switched to managed payments (probably seems like a long time ago to some of you), and maybe I'm having an early morning dim moment, but I have TAX INVOICE for each month which which includes final value fees but does not show what your total transactions for the month was,

and you have FINANCIAL STATEMENT for each month which shows "total transactions" but this figure is round about equal to the payout each month so it must be the net transactions after the fees on the tax invoice.

So basically my question revolves around not only where are my actual total transactions, but also don't you agree it would be quite easy to mess up your accounts by putting in the payout amount and then claiming the tax invoice as an expense? Can anyone help?

ballisticbrian

I'll just add a little more info. If you go to Performance > Sales and put Custom date, you can display the total sales for any given month.
However, to work out the expenses levied by eBay that you can claim against sales figures, you would need to follow the convoluted process of getting your figures for refunds and claims etc from the Financial Statements and the fees such as final value fees and listing fees from the tax invoice.
Can anyone else see how convoluted and ridiculous this is?


The only other way I can see would be to go by the Payout figure on the financial statement and ignore that it doesn't include what eBay retained and then on the tax invoice, extract the costs and  not including the payout!

LessImpecunious

I just found your post by googling to see if anyone else was complaining about this, as I was simply using the Invoice and Financial Statement and adding the total fees from one to the total transactions from the other to find my sales for the month. However, I've just done what you suggest and used the Performance > Sales >  Custom date (which I hadn't realised existed - thanks!) and Ebay are now saying "We've updated your sales reports. You can now see sales and costs on the same page" - and indeed you can!... AND they match what I'd calculated (and my bank statement, allowing for a closing funds carried forward element)...Admittedly this was for a simple month with no refunds, etc, but it looks a little more helpful!

ballisticbrian

LessImpecunious said:

Ebay are now saying "We've updated your sales reports. You can now see sales and costs on the same page" - and indeed you can!... 

But where are these details, on the same page of what? I can't see it on my most recent invoice?

LessImpecunious

If I go to the Sales tab under Performance, then click on Sales in the left-hand side column it takes me to the report; scrolling down it shows Total Sales on the left and "Selling Costs" on the right; with a breakdown per item sold if you continue scrolling down. You can set your own date range.

ballisticbrian

Thank you for that, I took note of that. To be honest though, it's not ideal generating sales figures like that for tax purposes because A. I will be putting a spreadsheet of that in my accounts instead of a tax invoice
and B. there will be little discrepancies; even though it says "includes refunds etc" there will be items bought in one month and returned the next, the figures will never be exact.

LessImpecunious

Yes, the problem I have is matching the figures Ebay provide to what's in the bank account, and allowing for money held over or vice versa to the next month. Also although they seemed OK for the last month's sales, I've just been looking at the subsequent month this morning, and found that the sales figures quoted by Ebay in their sales report don't match the transactions sum in the transactions report, and the fees on the invoice don't match the quoted "selling costs" on the sales report... even when I tried adding in or taking off all carried over sums etc.... I eventually arrived at something which logically matched what was in the bank account, and the actual figures for sales when I added up the price of the sold items, but took about an hour of headache... I can see why someone who has their ecommerce website on the same selling platform as ours recently told our FB group that they'd given up selling on Ebay because the accounting headaches were just too much...