Closing the year: what a reseller's books need

Whatever your accounting arrangement, the end of a year asks you for the same handful of numbers. Gathering them is tedious in direct proportion to how little you did during the year, so this is mostly a note about what to capture going forward.

What you sold

Gross sales, which is almost never what hit your bank. Platforms deduct their fees, sometimes shipping, sometimes tax handling, before paying you out. The figure you need is what the buyer paid, with the deductions recorded separately — not the deposit amount.

If you have only been recording deposits, you have been understating both revenue and expenses, which can look fine and can also be wrong in a direction that matters.

What it cost you to buy

Cost of goods. The amount you paid for the specific items that sold, not what you spent on inventory during the year. Those are different numbers whenever you still have unsold stock, which is always.

This is the one people skip, and it is the expensive one to reconstruct. It requires knowing, for each item sold, what you paid for it — which means recording a purchase price at the moment you acquire something, because you will not remember in January which bin that jacket came from.

If you take one habit from this guide, take that one. Price paid, captured at intake.

Everything else

Fees, postage, supplies, mileage, subscriptions, the portion of your home you genuinely use for the business. Unglamorous and collectively substantial.

Mileage in particular tends to be large and tends to go unclaimed, because it requires writing down trips as you make them. A sourcing route you drove weekly all year is a real expense that is almost impossible to reconstruct afterwards.

The honest advice

The reason year-end hurts is that it asks for records nobody enjoys keeping. The fix is not a better January, it is a slightly better February through December: capture the purchase price when you buy, keep fees and postage separate from sale price, and log the drive on the day.

We built the ledger side of Reskale around that, and importing your existing listings pulls what is already live on each marketplace into one inventory rather than making you retype it. But the habit matters more than the tool. A notebook used consistently beats good software used in a panic.

Talk to someone who does this for a living about your own situation. This is a note about record-keeping, not advice about your taxes.