Bookkeeping
Mileage and hours
Log sourcing trips and time worked, in a shape a tax preparer accepts.
The two records resellers most reliably fail to keep, and the two that most reliably matter.
Mileage
Every drive for the business is potentially deductible: sourcing trips, post office runs, storage unit visits, buying supplies.
For many resellers this is the single largest deduction they have. Someone sourcing three times a week is driving thousands of miles a year, and at standard mileage rates that is a substantial number.
It is also the deduction most often lost entirely, because nobody wrote the trips down and they cannot be reconstructed afterwards.
Logging a trip
Record date, purpose, and miles — or start and end odometer readings.
Log it from the mobile app in the car, before you have driven home and forgotten. That is the whole discipline; there is no clever way to recover a trip you did not record.
What counts
Business travel. Sourcing, shipping, supplies, storage, business banking.
What does not: commuting, and personal trips with a business errand tacked on. Where the line falls depends on your jurisdiction — ask someone qualified.
Keep it contemporaneous
"Contemporaneous" is the word tax authorities use, and it means recorded at the time rather than reconstructed later. A log built at the time is evidence. One built in April from memory and calendar entries is an estimate, and it is treated as one.
Hours
Time worked: sourcing, listing, photographing, packing, shipping, answering messages.
Why track it
To know your hourly rate. Net profit divided by hours worked. Most people who have never calculated this are surprised, and some are shocked.
It is the number that tells you whether a sourcing lane is worth it. £400 profit in a month sounds fine until it turns out to be sixty hours of work.
To decide what to stop doing. Time tracking by activity is what reveals that photographing and listing takes three times as long as sourcing, or that a particular category is not worth the handling.
For tax, in some circumstances, where business status or activity level matters.
Logging
Record date, hours, and what you were doing. Categorising by activity is what makes the data useful — total hours tells you the rate, hours by activity tells you what to change.
Hourly rate
Set your hourly rate in settings and Reskale can show what your time is producing against it.
Useful as a sourcing filter. If an item nets £8 and takes 40 minutes to photograph, list, pack and ship, you now know whether that clears your bar before you buy the next one like it.
Mobile
Both sync with the mobile app, which is the point. The entries hardest to remember are the ones you cannot make from a desk — a trip logged in the car park is worth more than a perfect system you use twice.
Related
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