QuickBooks can give you up-to-the-minute reports about the status of your eBay business and keep track of everything — including payroll and sales-tax liability — in the background. Here are a few things that are great about using QuickBooks to streamline an online business:
- Inventory reports: As you purchase inventory, aside from deducting the money from your checking account and expensing your merchandise account, QuickBooks adds the purchased merchandise to your inventory. Every time you sell an item, QuickBooks deducts the item from your inventory.
A portion of an inventory-tracking report.
This image shows you a part of an inventory report that was pulled out of the program. You can see how valuable the data is. With a click of the mouse, you can see how much is left in stock and the average number of items sold per week.
- Sales-tax tracking: Depending on how the program is set up (based on your own state sales tax laws), you can request a report that has all your taxable and nontaxable sales. The report calculates the amount of sales tax you owe. You can print this report for backup information of your sales-tax payments to the state.
- Payroll: Whether you use the Enhanced Payroll Service to prepare your payroll or input the deductions yourself, QuickBooks posts the appropriate withholdings to their own accounts. When it comes time to pay your employees’ withholding taxes, QuickBooks can generate the federal reporting form (all filled in) for submitting with your payment.
- Sales reports: QuickBooks gives you a plethora of reports with which you can analyze your sales professionally. One of the great reports is the Sales by Item Summary. This report gives you the following information for every inventoried item you sell, in whatever time period you choose:
- Quantity sold
- Total dollar amount sold
- Percentage of sales represented by each item
- The average price the item sold for
- COGS (cost of goods sold) by item
- Average cost of goods sold by total sales per item
- Gross profit margin in dollar amounts
- Gross profit margin expressed as percentage
Depending on how you post your transactions, you can analyze your eBay sales, website sales, and brick-and-mortar sales (individually or together). You can also select any date range for your reports.
