Bookkeeping

Income and expenses

Where sales income comes from, and how to log the money going out.

The money in and the money out.

Income

Income arrives automatically from Sales. Every synced sale carries:

Sale price — what the buyer paid.
Fees — what the marketplace took, from its own reporting.
Net — what reached you.

Fees are taken from each marketplace's reporting rather than estimated from a percentage. That distinction is worth money: a flat percentage misses ad fees, promoted-listing charges, payment processing and adjustments, and it misses them in the direction that overstates your profit.

Cancelled orders are excluded from income. They did not happen financially. They stay visible in Sales because a pattern of cancellations is worth seeing, but they do not count.

Sales from elsewhere

Sold in cash, at a market, or on a marketplace Reskale does not support? Use Mark as sold on the item. It records the sale for the books — and makes the item's other listings eligible for auto-delist, which is the more urgent half.

Cost of goods

What you paid for the item. Recorded on the inventory item.

Enter it at intake. A £30 lot of twelve items is £2.50 each, and that arithmetic is trivial on the day you bought it and impossible eight months later.

Cost of goods is what turns net proceeds into actual profit. Without it, the books show revenue and fees and call the remainder profit, which it is not.

Expenses

Everything else the business spends. Log with date, amount, category and a note.

Categories that come up for nearly every reseller:

Shipping supplies — mailers, boxes, tape, labels. See Supplies.
Postage not covered by the buyer.
Subscriptions — including Reskale.
Equipment — scales, printers, lighting, storage.
Sourcing costs — entry fees, parking, tolls.
Home office, where it applies to you.

Note what it was

"£47.30 — supplies" is a line you will not be able to defend in eighteen months. "£47.30 — 200x 6x9 poly mailers, Amazon" is a record.

The note takes five seconds and is the difference between a documented expense and a number you hope nobody asks about.

Recurring expenses

Subscriptions and anything else that repeats can be logged once as recurring rather than re-entered monthly. Missed recurring expenses are a slow, invisible leak — twelve months of an unlogged subscription is a real deduction lost.

Reviewing

The bookkeeping screen shows income, expenses and net over a period. Worth looking at monthly, not annually — a monthly review catches a missing month of expenses while you can still reconstruct it.

Mileage and hours
Receipt scanner — capture expenses without typing.
Year-end and exports

Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us.