Table of Content
Share This Article
- Published: July 11, 2025
- Last Updated: July 11, 2025
Key Takeaways
- An e-commerce bookkeeper expertly manages all online retail financials, from multi-platform sales like Amazon or Shopify to handling fees, inventory, and digital payments.
- Key responsibilities of an e-commerce bookkeeper include recording all transactions, tracking COGS, managing invoices and bills, handling AP/AR, and performing bank reconciliation.
- They also provide support for financial reporting, forecasting and crucial tax preparation and compliance with HMRC requirements for UK businesses.
- COGS tracking is dynamic and ongoing for e-commerce, as bookkeepers match product costs to revenue for accurate gross profit figures.
- A dedicated e-commerce bookkeeper ensures tax-time is made easy by keeping VAT tracking accurate and records compliant with HMRC's (MTD) requirements.
- Dedicated e-commerce bookkeepers specialise in complex online retail such as multi-channel sales, digital payments, inventory, or specific reporting.
From Data to Dollars
Elevate Your Ecommerce with Smart Accounting & Analytics
For online businesses, achieving true financial clarity amidst diverse revenue streams and digital payment complexities can be challenging. Standard bookkeeping often struggles to capture the nuances of e-commerce operations, leading to incomplete insights. A dedicated e-commerce bookkeeper offers tailored expertise needed to deal with these complexities. They skilfully manage your unique financial flows, providing accurate data and strategic reports. This ensures you make informed decisions, driving efficiency and sustainable profitability for your online business.
Who Is an E-commerce Bookkeeper?
An e-commerce bookkeeper is a specialised financial professional who understands the unique ins and outs of online retail. Along with tracking numbers, they manage the entire back end of your store’s financials. That includes everything from sales across platforms like Shopify, Amazon, Etsy, or WooCommerce to handling fees, returns, inventory costs, and digital payment processors like Stripe or PayPal.
Moreover, e-commerce bookkeeper uses cloud-based accounting software like QuickBooks Online, Xero, Sage, and Zoho Books to sync sales, automate data entry, reconcile accounts, and generate accurate reports all in real time. They make sure your COGS (cost of goods sold), margins, and cash flow stay clear and correct.
What Are the Key Responsibilities of An E-commerce Bookkeeper?
The responsibilities of an e-commerce bookkeeper are essential to the stability and growth of any online business. These include recording every transaction, tracking costs, managing bills, staying on top of payables and receivables, and reconciling bank accounts. In addition, they also generate accurate reports, help plan budgets, forecast trends, and keep your taxes in check so you can focus on growing the business. Let’s learn more about these responsibilities:
Transactions Recording
Offshore e-commerce bookkeepers manage your daily financial transactions across your sales platforms with accuracy and consistency. This includes sales, refunds, fees, shipping charges, and payment gateway transfers from multiple online platforms. This ensures your books are always up-to-date, audit-ready, and compliant with HMRC requirements, making it easy to review your financial activity whenever needed.
Keeping Track Of COGS
COGS refers to the direct costs involved in producing or sourcing the product you sell. Your bookkeeper tracks these expenses including product purchase prices, import duties, packaging, shipping to warehouse, and handling fees, and matches them to the revenue generated from each product sold. This gives you accurate gross profit figures.
Manage Invoice and Bills
Whether you are invoicing clients or receiving supplier bills, your bookkeeper ensures all incoming and outgoing documents are properly entered, tracked and scheduled. For accounts payable, they record supplier invoices and track due dates to avoid late fees or missed payments. This function is critical for maintaining healthy cash flow and ensuring your business doesn’t miss important financial obligations.
Accounts Payable and Receivable Management
Your e-commerce bookkeeper handles the entire receivables process, from generating and sending customer invoices to tracking payments and following up on overdue accounts, ensuring prompt collections and proper cash flow management. On the payable’s sides, they record supplier bills, schedule timely payments, and prevent late fees, supporting strong vendor relationships and optimising your cash position.
Financial Reporting
E-commerce bookkeepers prepare monthly financial reports that give you a full view of your business’s financial health. This typically includes a profit and loss statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. Reports can be broken down by sales channel (Shopify, Amazon, and eBay), product category, or region, depending on your setup. These reports support informed decision-making and help you to assess performance, profitability, and sustainability.
Bank Reconciliation
Regular bank and payment gateway reconciliations are vital for keeping your cash balances accurate. E-commerce bookkeepers match your ledger entries with bank statements and platforms like PayPal or Stripe, identifying and correcting missing, duplicate, or incorrect transactions. This process is typically done monthly or weekly for high-volume sellers and ensures your business always knows how much cash is available.
Budgeting and Forecasting
Beyond recording past performance, a skilled e-commerce bookkeeper can support budgeting and financial forecasting. Using historical data, they help project future sales, estimate costs, and plan for inventory purchases. This might involve cash flow forecasting, scenario modelling, and setting financial targets. It’s especially important for seasonal businesses, the ones scaling quickly, or those looking to raise funding or hire staff.
Tax Preparation and Compliance
Offshore bookkeepers support your tax obligations by organising and preparing VAT returns, corporation tax filings, and other statutory submissions. Their expertise in UK e-commerce regulations ensures your business remains compliant with UK IFRS and avoids penalties or missed deadlines.
How Will My Online Store Benefit from Hiring an Ecommerce Bookkeeper?
Hiring an ecommerce bookkeeper gives you a clear view of profits, cash flow clarity, and better decision-making support. With platform-specific expertise, accurate inventory tracking, and time-saving processes, they help you stay cost-efficient and fully prepared when tax time rolls around.
Clear View of Profits
An ecommerce bookkeeper doesn’t just track sales they separate gross revenue from platform fees, shipping costs, ad spend, and product costs to give you an accurate net profit number. They reconcile reports from platforms like Shopify, Amazon, or Etsy with your accounting software, so you’re not just guessing based on top-line sales. This gives you a clear view of profitability, helping you avoid under-pricing or overestimating what you are actually making.
Platform Specific Expertise
Unlike a general bookkeeper, an ecommerce bookkeeper knows how each platform like Amazon, Etsy, and Shopify structures fees, payouts, and returns. A bookkeeper who knows these platforms can extract the right reports, handle multicurrency payments, and properly log things like returns, chargebacks, and promotions. This cuts down on errors and ensures your records reflect how each platform operates.
Cost-Efficiency
An ecommerce bookkeeper already knows the systems you use, so they don’t waste time figuring out your sales process or how your platforms work. That means fewer hours billed, faster turnaround, and less back-and-forth. Because your books stay accurate and VAT-compliant throughout the year, they also spend less time and charges less at year-end. Clean books also mean fewer costly errors, like misreporting or under-declaring income.
Tax-time Made Easy
Selling online in the UK comes with tight tax rules especially with Making Tax Digital (MTD) and quarterly VAT submissions. A good ecommerce bookkeeper keeps your VAT tracking accurate whether it’s standard, zero-rated, or international. They also ensure your records meet HMRC digital requirements, making it simple for you to file without last-minute chaos or penalties. Also, due to this you avoid late submissions, penalties, and the stress of last-minute scrambling during tax season.
Cash Flow Clarity
E-commerce bookkeepers track real-time cash flow not just sales, but inventory purchases, ad spend, platform fees, subscriptions, and payouts. They break down exactly what’s coming in, what’s going out, and when. You get clear numbers on what’s available to reinvest, not just a misleading bank balance. This helps avoid cash shortages caused by delayed payouts or large supplier invoices. It’s precise, daily financial tracking built for online businesses.
Better Decision Making
With monthly ecommerce-specific reports, you can see real profitability by product, monitor sales velocity, and overspending in areas like ads or fulfilment. Your bookkeeper delivers profit and loss statements, margin reports, and clear insights to guide decisions on pricing, promotions, restocking, and cost-cutting. No more guesswork your decisions are driven by data. With this level of clarity, you stop reacting and start scaling strategically.
Time Saving
Instead of spending hours each week categorising transactions, matching bank statements, downloading platform reports, and troubleshooting errors, your ecommerce bookkeeper handles all that. You can focus on marketing, sourcing, or customer experience whatever that needs to grow the business without being buried in spreadsheets.
Inventory Tracking and Margin
A skilled ecommerce bookkeeper connects your inventory system with your accounting software, logs accurate SKU-level costs including shipping, import duties, etc., and matches COGS correctly to each sale. They also highlight products that aren’t selling or are moving slowly, so you can see where your money is stuck in unsold stock. This helps you make smarter pricing decisions based on real profit margins, not just guesses
General Vs E-commerce Bookkeeper
| Aspects | General Bookkeeper | E-commerce Bookkeeper |
|---|---|---|
| Sales Channels | Manages sales from physical stores or single channels, recognised at point of sale. | Track sales across multiple online platforms (Amazon, Shopify, eBay, etc.), revenue recognised on fulfilment. |
| Payment Processing | Handles cash, cheques, and card payments via POS systems. | Reconciles payments from digital wallets and third-party processors, manages lump-sum payouts and platform fees. |
| Inventory Management | Tracks inventory on-site or in single locations, simpler stock management. | Monitors inventory across multiple warehouses or fulfilment centers, handles returns and complex stock flows. |
| Tax Compliance | Focuses on local tax rules and simple VAT tax filings. | Navigates multi-jurisdictional taxes, cross-border VAT, and digital sales tax requirements. |
| Transaction Volume | Manages moderate, often manual, transaction volumes. | Handles high transaction volumes, relies on automation for data entry and reconciliation. |
| Reporting and Analysis | Generates standard financial statements and basic analysis. | Provides detailed reports on sales channels, ad spend, conversion rates, and customer acquisition costs. |
| Specialised Knowledge | Broad financial knowledge, may lack sector-specific insight. | Expertise in e-commerce models, digital marketing expenses, and online business metrics. |
Hire Expert E-commerce Bookkeeper for Your UK Online Store
Running an e-commerce business is fast-paced and demanding and your bookkeeping should keep up. It is not just about tracking sales and expenses. You need someone who understands the ins and outs of platforms like Shopify, Amazon, WooCommerce, and how payments flow through payment gateways. That is where a skilled ecommerce bookkeeper can be valuable to you.
At Whiz Consulting, we specialise in ecommerce accounting and bookkeeping services, with 10+ years of experience supporting online retailers just like you. We handle everything from VAT obligations, reconcile multi-channel sales, track marketplace fees, to keep your financial records HMRC-compliant. Whether you are a startup scaling fast or a multi-channel seller juggling SKUs and suppliers, we make sure your books are accurate, clean, and ready for tax time.
Get customized plan that supports your growth
Have questions in mind? Find answers here...
Cost varies depending on the complexity of your business, number of transactions, and services needed. Also, for smaller operations with fewer transactions may be on the lower end, while larger or high-volume e-commerce stores may need more comprehensive support.
Yes, many e-commerce bookkeepers offer monthly financial reports like profit and loss statements, balance sheets, and cash flow reports. Some also offer forecasting, budgeting, and trend analysis to support strategic planning and data-driven decision-making.
Ideally, your books should be updated weekly or biweekly to keep financial data accurate and current. However, at a minimum, monthly updates are standard to ensure basic financial visibility and reporting accuracy.
They will need access to your sales channels like Shopify, Amazon, etc., payment processors (Stripe and PayPal), business bank accounts, credit card statements, receipts, and any existing accounting software. The more complete and organized your records, the smoother the process.
Thousands of business owners trust Whiz to manage their account
Let us take care of your books and make this financial year a good one.
