If you sell on Amazon, Shopify, eBay or Etsy, your accountant needs much more than basic bank statements and rough sales totals. They need complete, highly structured financial information that clearly details gross sales, marketplace fees, customer refunds, taxes, and final settlement payouts. Providing properly organised ecommerce data allows your accountant to reconcile your accounts accurately, prepare reliable financial reports, and spend far more time helping your business grow instead of chasing missing information.

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What to Give Your Accountant if You Sell on Amazon, Shopify, eBay or Etsy

If you sell on Amazon, Shopify, eBay or Etsy, your accountant needs much more than basic bank statements and rough sales totals. They need complete, highly structured financial information that clearly details gross sales, marketplace fees, customer refunds, taxes, and final settlement payouts. Providing properly organised ecommerce data allows your accountant to reconcile your accounts accurately, prepare reliable financial reports, and spend far more time helping your business grow instead of chasing missing information.

Navigating the financial side of an ecommerce business can feel overwhelming for many founders. However, building a seamless data pipeline between your sales channels and your accountant is the most critical step toward long-term profitability and strict tax compliance.

Your Accountant Is Trying to Understand How Your Business Makes Money

Every ecommerce business generates financial information in a completely different way. Understanding these differences is essential for accurate bookkeeping.

Amazon provides complex marketplace settlements that bundle weeks of activity into a single deposit. Shopify combines direct store activity with various payment processing gateways like Stripe or PayPal. eBay and Etsy each have their own unique reporting formats, payout schedules, and intricate fee structures.

Although the downloaded reports look very different from one platform to the next, your accountant is ultimately trying to answer the exact same fundamental questions for your general ledger:

• How much did the business actually sell in gross revenue?
• What specific operational costs were deducted before payment?
• How much sales tax or VAT was collected from customers?
• What exact refunds were issued during the reporting period?
• What final net amount actually reached the business bank account?

Providing complete and transparent information allows these critical questions to be answered quickly and accurately. When your accountant has the right data, they can calculate your true profit margins and ensure you are not overpaying on your taxes.

A Bank Statement Is Only Part of the Picture

Many ecommerce business owners incorrectly assume their accountant can simply prepare the year-end accounts by looking at the money received in the business bank feed.

Unfortunately, bank deposits rarely tell the whole story. This is known as the difference between gross sales and net payouts.

Before money ever reaches your bank account, online marketplaces often deduct several expenses automatically:

• Selling fees and platform commissions
• Payment processing gateway fees
• Customer refunds and associated chargebacks
• Advertising costs and pay-per-click campaign spend
• Fulfillment fees and warehouse storage charges
• VAT and sales tax adjustments

Without clear visibility over these hidden deductions, your accountant has to spend incredibly valuable billable hours manually rebuilding your entire transaction history. The more detailed information you provide upfront, the more reliable your final financial reporting becomes.

A Practical Checklist for Every Month

Preparing financial information for your accountant does not have to be a complicated or stressful ordeal. A consistent monthly process is usually far more valuable than sending massive amounts of disconnected data at the end of the financial year.

A highly useful monthly reporting package should always include the following items.

Marketplace Settlement Reports

These critical documents explain exactly how gross sales become net payouts after all platform deductions have been applied. Your accountant needs these to match the platform data against the bank deposit perfectly.

Payment Provider Information

Where separate payment platforms are used alongside a storefront (such as Klarna, Afterpay, or PayPal), these specific records help explain the complex movement of funds across different clearing accounts.

Bank Statements

These statements act as the ultimate source of truth. They confirm that the settlement payouts reported by the marketplace have been physically received in your account correctly.

Refund and Adjustment Information

Customer refunds and other account adjustments must be clearly visible rather than hidden within bulk bank deposits. This ensures that your revenue is not artificially inflated, which could lead to paying unnecessary taxes.

Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) and Inventory Values

To calculate your true profitability, your accountant needs to know the value of the stock you are holding and the cost of the items you sold during the month.

VAT and Sales Tax Records

Where applicable, detailed VAT information helps ensure that your tax reporting remains fully accurate and compliant with local tax authority regulations.

Providing these exact items consistently makes month-end bookkeeping significantly more efficient for both you and your accounting professional.

Selling on Multiple Platforms Requires One Organised Process

Businesses often begin their journey with one primary marketplace before expanding their reach. A typical growth journey might include starting on Amazon, launching a dedicated Shopify store, and eventually expanding to eBay and Etsy to capture new audiences.

Every single additional sales channel increases your bookkeeping complexity exponentially.

Instead of sending separate, confusing reports at different times of the month, you should create one highly organised monthly process covering every single platform. Your accountant can then review all financial activity together rather than treating each marketplace as a completely independent bookkeeping exercise.

Using tools like a dedicated Shopify accounting integration ensures that your direct-to-consumer data matches the formatting of your marketplace data. This creates much better reporting and drastically reduces unnecessary administrative work.

The Cost of Incomplete Financial Information

When vital financial information is missing or poorly formatted, accountants often spend hours of their time performing repetitive administrative tasks.

They are forced to spend time:

• Requesting additional CSV reports via email.
• Matching net payouts manually using complex spreadsheets.
• Identifying missing platform fees and hidden advertising costs.
• Reconstructing historical settlement activity line by line.
• Correcting messy bookkeeping entries in the cloud accounting software.

This frustrating cycle heavily delays month-end reporting and completely reduces the time your accountant has available to offer strategic financial advice. Accurate bookkeeping always starts with complete financial data. The easier it is for your accountant to seamlessly understand your ecommerce activity, the more tangible value they can provide to your business growth.

How Link My Books Makes Sharing Financial Information Easier

Rather than manually downloading and collecting reports from every single ecommerce platform, you can automate the entire pipeline. Link My Books helps organise supported marketplace settlement data into perfectly structured accounting entries for Xero and QuickBooks.

By utilizing automated ecommerce bookkeeping, gross sales, marketplace fees, refunds, taxes, and net payouts are automatically separated into clear accounting summaries. This makes it incredibly easy for accountants to review financial activity without ever needing to rebuild reports manually.

This means ecommerce businesses no longer need to worry about whether every single deduction has been explained or if every settlement has been interpreted correctly by their accountant. The software handles the complex data translation automatically.

For accountants, the professional benefits include:

• Significantly cleaner financial records and a tidy general ledger.
• Lightning-fast bank reconciliation.
• Highly consistent settlement accounting across the entire client portfolio.
• Greatly reduced manual data processing.
• Better visibility across multiple diverse ecommerce platforms.
• Much more time available for deep financial analysis.

For business owners, it creates a far simpler way to work with their accountant while massively improving their daily confidence in the numbers behind the business. If you want to make month-end easier for both you and your accountant, Link My Books provides a perfectly structured way to prepare ecommerce accounting data.

Comparing Ecommerce Accounting Solutions

Several ecommerce accounting platforms exist to help automate bookkeeping, but they solve distinctly different parts of the financial process. Understanding the landscape can help you choose the right tool for your specific accountant.

Several ecommerce accounting platforms help businesses manage marketplace financial data in different ways. A2X focuses on settlement-based accounting summaries, making it suitable for businesses that need reliable marketplace data transferred into Xero or QuickBooks. Taxomate specialises in automated transaction syncing, helping sellers summarise and connect marketplace data directly with their accounting software. Entriwise provides broader data integration and workflow automation, making it a strong option for businesses managing complex financial data flows and inventory. Link My Books focuses on clean, structured summary reconciliation, helping sellers accurately map taxes and fees for simpler and more efficient account reconciliation.

A2X

A2X converts marketplace settlement data into solid accounting summaries for Xero and QuickBooks. It is widely known in the industry and helps accountants automate basic settlement accounting for supported global marketplaces.

Taxomate

Taxomate focuses heavily on automating marketplace accounting by summarising ecommerce transactions and synchronising them with popular accounting software platforms.

Entriwise

Entriwise integrates ecommerce marketplace data with accounting software to reduce manual imports and help businesses automate broader financial data flows.

Why Link My Books Is Different

Link My Books focuses specifically on giving accountants flawlessly structured financial information rather than simply transferring raw transaction data from one system to another.

Its unique settlement-based accounting approach intelligently organises sales, operational fees, customer refunds, collected taxes, and final payouts into neat accounting summaries that are incredibly easy to reconcile and review. (If you want to see how this works for specific platforms, you can review our Amazon bookkeeping tools guide).

This structured approach creates a much smoother collaboration between ecommerce businesses and their accountants while drastically improving reporting accuracy across all supported sales channels.

Small Improvements That Save Time Every Month

Working with your accountant becomes much easier when financial information is highly organised before month-end approaches.

Simple operational habits can significantly reduce bookkeeping delays. You should focus on keeping all marketplace records organised in one secure folder, providing required settlement reports promptly, and using structured accounting automation software.

The ultimate objective is not to send your accountant more information. The goal is to send them significantly better information.

Helping Your Accountant Help Your Business

The professional relationship with your accountant should easily extend far beyond just preparing annual tax returns.

When they receive complete, highly structured ecommerce financial information on time, they can spend substantially less time correcting bad data. Instead, they can spend more time helping you understand channel profitability, cash flow forecasting, and overall business performance.

If you want to simplify the vital information you share with your accountant, start a free trial of Link My Books today and see exactly how structured settlement accounting can permanently improve your ecommerce bookkeeping workflow.

FAQ

What information should I give my accountant if I sell online?

Your accountant should receive structured information that explains your complete ecommerce activity rather than just your net bank deposits. This usually includes marketplace settlement reports, standard bank statements, payment provider information, customer refund details, and accurate VAT records where applicable. Together, these specific records heavily help explain how gross sales become net payouts and allow your accountant to prepare flawlessly accurate financial reports without spending unnecessary time reconstructing marketplace activity.

Why are settlement reports important?

Settlement reports clearly show the complete financial journey from the initial customer purchase to the final bank payout. They critically include gross sales, marketplace fees, withheld taxes, customer refunds, and other deductions that may not appear clearly on a standard bank statement. Without these settlement reports, accountants often have to estimate figures or manually rebuild financial activity, making bank reconciliation significantly slower and greatly increasing the risk of severe reporting errors.

How does Link My Books help when working with an accountant?

Link My Books automatically converts supported ecommerce settlement data into beautifully structured accounting entries for Xero and QuickBooks Online. Gross sales, marketplace fees, refunds, taxes, and payouts are automatically organised into clear accounting summaries that accountants can review incredibly efficiently. This automation permanently reduces manual bookkeeping, heavily improves bank reconciliation, and creates a much more consistent accounting process for ecommerce businesses selling across multiple supported platforms.

Do I need different reports for Amazon, Shopify, eBay and Etsy?

Each platform naturally generates very different financial reports, but your accountant ultimately needs consistent accounting information for the general ledger. Rather than treating every single marketplace separately, it is far more effective to organise all settlement data into one structured bookkeeping process. This heavily improves overall reporting quality and makes it remarkably easier to compare financial performance across different sales channels accurately.

Can organised bookkeeping reduce accounting costs?

Yes. Well-organised financial information often reduces the exact amount of manual work required during month-end bookkeeping and bank reconciliation. When professional accountants receive complete settlement information in a highly structured format, they spend significantly less time requesting missing reports or correcting broken transactions. This creates a highly efficient workflow and safely allows more time to focus on strategic financial reporting and commercial advice rather than basic administrative tasks.

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