Accounting, Scaling Businesses
How to run your Ecommerce business with simple Accounting Integrations
Sep 23, 2021
Sep 23, 2021
Many E-Commerce businesses such as Amazon, ETSY, Ebay and online shops, experience large volumes of transactions on a daily basis, and without integration and automation, you would require significant resources and will be working 24 hours a day just to keep up!
With any adventurous business plan, you’re going to want to implement scalable processes, where you can focus your time and attention on growing your sales, without having to worry about changing your process.
Three main reasons to adopting accounting integrations are:
Once you’ve decided that this is the best approach for your business, we would recommend you start with your Accounting Software. Xero and Quickbooks are generally the most popular accounting software providers for E-Commerce SME’s as they are generally user friendly and have fairly intuitive dashboards for business owners.
When you’re comparing both providers, it’s important to look at their connected apps section where they outline the most popular integrations and what they can achieve. Our recommendation is to choose the accounting software provider that allows for the most integration and automation – as it will benefit your business most. It’s also worth taking advice from a specialist E-commerce accountant, before you begin to spend time setting up your software.
Next, you’ll want to map out what you’re looking to achieve and design your workflows accordingly. Map out your processes, which sound like a dream and too good to be true. That way, you’ve identified what you’re looking to achieve and can now spend your time looking at each integration in depth.
The ultimate goal here to make your life as smooth as possible is to be able to have your accounting software, point of sale system, payment provider, and stock management system all working together simultaneously.
Next steps:
You’ve now chosen your accounting software and set out your ideal processes, now it’s time to begin looking at individual software in more detail. You may find, which can sometimes be the case, when you start to understand the integration in-depth, that some elements of your desired process will require a small work around – but remember, software companies are continuously developing and listening to consumer feedback, so something which may require a small technical work around at the moment, may not be the case in 12 months time.
There can be hundreds of software providers covering different areas, so we’ve included some of the leading providers below which many of our E-commerce businesses use, so you don’t have to spend as much time comparing them all.
Online shop
Shopify and Woocommerce run your online shop.
Selling platforms
There are external selling platforms such as Amazon fulfilment and ETSY which expose your product to millions of consumers. All reporting can be integrated with your accounting platform.
Payment providers
Many Ecommerce businesses offer various payment methods to consumers. Popular providers to look into further include Stipe, Paypal and Klarna.
CRM and Workflow systems
Hubspot and Salesforce are two popular CRM systems however can become quite costly. New start up businesses are now looking towards how they can design ‘off the shelf’ products to suit their needs, with large investment and growing awareness of Monday.com and Asana. This may not be suitable for all, but worth looking into the capabilities based on your ideal process you designed earlier and assessing limitations.
Connecting software
Zapier all day long! This software saves so much time as this will connect various software and automate actions/processes. It’s certainly recommended to spend a little extra time reviewing this software as there are so many capabilities.
If you’re looking for support, our accountancy and tax specialists are available to support you through this transition. Feel free to contact us: [email protected] / 01932 485 325
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