How eAccounts saves 2 weeks a month on e-commerce VAT reconciliation (accurate to the penny)

eAccounts was already automated and still checking every VAT return line by line across around 500 e-commerce clients, until the firm moved its whole book to Link My Books and stopped rebuilding the settlement data first.

For most firms with e-commerce clients, the bookkeeping is the obvious problem. If the payouts are still being broken down by hand, that work is punishing enough on its own, and it is usually the first thing a firm tries to fix.

VAT is the part that stays hard afterwards. Every channel reports differently, every country treats the sale differently, and the treatment has to be right before anything is filed.

eAccounts is a 12-person UK practice with just under 1,000 clients, and between 50% and 60% of them sell online. That is around 500 e-commerce clients, most of them across several channels and several countries. Co-founder Kristian Corbisiero, a chartered accountant, set the firm up to serve that market deliberately. "That's kind of why we set up eAccounts, to kind of target that clientele."

Multi-channel, multi-country VAT is a discipline in itself, and eAccounts built its processes around getting it right at volume rather than around any one piece of software. Kristian's own time goes on strategy, process development, technology and oversight rather than day-to-day production, and when a system stops earning its place he is the one who goes and finds the replacement. "I would test them all, I'd trial them all. We're quite proactive with it."

We first wrote about the firm in the eAccounts success story. This piece goes deeper on the VAT work behind it.

Why the client mix keeps making this harder

The shape of e-commerce has changed under his clients over the past few years, and the direction of travel has made the VAT position more complicated rather than less. The pandemic years brought hundreds of new sellers onto Amazon FBA, where the marketplace handled a great deal and the seller mostly watched the payouts arrive. Rising fulfilment and advertising costs have since pushed those same businesses the other way.

"I would say a lot more clients are moving away from Amazon and moving more into, like a Shopify front or something like that. Creating more of an actual brand for themselves and trying to get direct traffic."

That shift matters to whoever is doing the books. A client who once sold through a single marketplace now runs their own store alongside it, and each channel reports its sales, deducts its fees and handles its tax differently. Add a second country and the number of treatments to get right multiplies again. None of that is unusual now. It is what a growing e-commerce client looks like, and it is why the VAT work grows faster than the client does.

Where the month was going

The firm was never doing this by hand. An automated system was already in place, and the automation itself was not the problem. The reviewing was.

Each VAT return meant going back over the output line by line and adjusting it before anything could be filed, on top of the month-end and year-end work that sat around it. At multi-platform, multi-country scale, that review ran to days and sometimes weeks.

"It was just becoming such a time-consuming process, month-end, quarter-end, year-end VATs, days if not weeks of work, especially when you've got multi-platform, multi-locations."

Doing the work twice is the part that stings. The system ran, and then a chartered accountant went back over its output before the numbers could be trusted, which meant the firm was paying for automation and still paying for the review. Europe was the pressure point, and as the European market changed and VAT treatment moved with it, the review burden grew with every additional country a client sold into.

How eAccounts moved the whole book

There was no long evaluation process. "I jumped straight in."

Kristian already had a couple of clients running on Link My Books and found the setup wizards quick to grasp, so for a period the firm ran split across both systems. That gave him something a demo cannot: a direct comparison on live clients, with real settlements and real VAT treatments.

"As soon as we used one or two clients with LMB, it was just the case of, right, let's just try and shift everything over as quickly as possible."

The decision came down to a clear order of priority. Tax accuracy first, speed of understanding second, and everything else after that.

How the firm runs it across the client book

Onboarding

Every VAT-registered e-commerce client goes onto Link My Books at the start, as one of the first things the firm does rather than something it gets round to later. "If they're VAT registered, they have to. It's just straight away, as soon as they come on, it's one of the first things we do."

Each new client is assigned a manager and a bookkeeper within the week. The bookkeeper sends the connection link naming the exact channels that client sells on, because eAccounts has already established which platforms are in play during onboarding. From that point the work sits with the firm rather than the client.

"If Link My Books isn't working, if it's not pulling through, then that's our problem. It's not the client's."

Clients hear only that their bookkeeping is done and their VAT is due. That is the service eAccounts sells: premium, hands off, no homework. The cost of the software is built into the firm's own pricing at proposal stage, so it is settled once and does not resurface.

Month-end

The team reviews the accounting and VAT position rather than rebuilding the underlying reconciliation.

"We check the data from an accounting sense, like a profit and loss balance sheet, VAT, standard."

That review still happens every month. What has gone is the need to reconstruct the settlement data before the review can even begin.

The confidence to work that way was built in two ways, and the first is unglamorous. The firm knows what the numbers should look like before it sees them, because Kristian's team knows how advertising and services are treated for VAT and knows when fees are changing, since the channels and the software both give notice. "We know what we're looking for. It's already happening, so it looks as if it's supposed to."

He is direct that this only works in trained hands. He has taken on clients who had the software running perfectly well and had set it up wrong, with VAT going unaccounted for as a result. 

The tooling removes the reconciliation work. It does not remove the accountant.

The enquiry that settled it

Kristian puts the saving at roughly half his team's e-commerce workload. "I'd say it saves me, saves a team probably 2 weeks a month. I'd say 50% easy."

Asked about the industry figure of five hours saved per client per month, his answer was short: "Completely underselling it." Some eAccounts clients reconcile daily across eBay, Etsy and Shopify, where doing it by hand was never a realistic option in the first place.

The moment that mattered most came about a year before this interview, when HMRC opened a VAT enquiry into one of the firm's larger clients. European taxes across several countries, around a million transactions in scope, and every figure open to question. Kristian pulled the audit trail from Link My Books, pulled everything from Amazon, and ran the reconciliation end to end.

"It balanced to the penny."

The reconciliation supported the figures the client had filed, and the enquiry was closed. That is eAccounts' work standing up to scrutiny rather than any view HMRC took of the software, and it is what turned a working process into a trusted one. The confidence it left him with is that even a worst-case examination of every line would find the numbers holding.

What it changed commercially

The capacity argument is the one Kristian comes back to. Large, high-volume, multi-country clients that other practices would think twice about are clients eAccounts can say yes to, because the reconciliation is no longer the thing that decides whether the work is viable. For a client with hundreds of thousands of transactions, the firm is not selling data entry. It is selling the fact that the work is already handled, and that the numbers underneath it will hold.

Asked what the setup gives him in two words, Kristian picked confidence and efficiency. "You get extreme efficiency within your team and clientele, but then you've got confidence that the clients are having a good service and it's accurate."

What Kristian would tell another firm

His advice is aimed at practices still handling e-commerce records by hand, and the barrier he names is not the software. It is that the one person in the firm capable of implementing it is usually too busy servicing clients to stop and do it.

"Sometimes the person in the firm who's good at it is so busy that they don't have time to pull themselves out of that client, so they need to actually be removed from the business to do it."

His answer is to treat rollout as a project rather than a task. Stagger it at 15 or 20 clients a month, prove it on the first few, and price the implementation as work rather than absorbing it into existing fees.

He is candid about the halfway house, where a firm holds a few e-commerce clients without committing to the specialism, and his view is that clients notice. "If you're not actually an expert and they start asking questions, it's just not going to work if the service isn't available."

Asked how he describes Link My Books to another accountant, he keeps it short. "If you've got someone who knows what they're using and has got experience, it's an unbelievable tool."

Where to start

eAccounts had a head start, because e-commerce was the plan from day one. Most firms are not in that position and do not need to be, and what is worth borrowing is the method rather than the history. Prove it on one or two of the messiest VAT-registered clients, the ones where the return already runs long, and see whether the numbers hold. Which client would you put on it first?

Link My Books breaks every settlement into sales, refunds, fees and taxes and posts a clean summary to Xero or QuickBooks that reconciles against the bank deposit, with UK VAT handling built in.

See where eAccounts' two weeks a month come from. Book a demo.

Frequently asked questions

What is e-commerce VAT reconciliation?

It is the work of matching what a sales channel reports against what it actually pays out, then applying the correct VAT treatment to each part. Sales, refunds, fees and taxes all sit inside a single settlement, and they rarely carry the same treatment. That is where the time and the errors come from.

How did eAccounts' VAT figures hold up under an HMRC enquiry?

During a VAT enquiry into a large multi-country client, Kristian pulled the audit trail from Link My Books alongside the Amazon data and reconciled it end to end. It balanced to the penny, the reconciliation supported the filed figures, and the enquiry was closed.

How long does it take to move an existing client book across?

eAccounts ran both systems side by side for a period, proved Link My Books on one or two clients, then moved the rest quickly. Kristian's advice to larger firms is to stagger the rollout at 15 to 20 clients a month rather than attempting the whole book at once.

Does automation mean a junior can handle e-commerce VAT?

Not on its own. Kristian is clear that the tooling removes the reconciliation work, not the accountant. He has taken on clients who set the software up themselves and got the VAT treatment wrong. The setup still needs someone who understands e-commerce VAT.

How much time does it save a firm?

Kristian estimates around two weeks a month across his team, or roughly 50%. He described the commonly quoted figure of five hours per client per month as "completely underselling it" for firms with daily-reconciliation clients on eBay, Etsy or Shopify.