Every reseller has the same July. Or January, or April, depending on where you sell. A folder of eBay reports, a bank statement, a shoebox of postage receipts, and an accountant asking for one number nobody has.
The fix is not a better spreadsheet. It is knowing which records matter, which ones eBay already keeps for you, and which ones only you can keep.
What the accountant actually needs
Strip it back and a reseller's books come down to six things for the year:
- Gross sales. Everything that sold, including postage buyers paid.
- Cost of goods sold. What you paid for the items that sold. Not what you paid for everything you bought.
- Selling fees. Final value fees, per-order fees, promoted listing fees, store subscription.
- Postage you paid. Labels, bags, boxes, tape.
- Business expenses. Storage, software, mileage, equipment, the phone plan you use for listing.
- Refunds and write-offs. Money that went back out, and stock that will never sell.
Gross sales minus all of that is the profit you pay tax on. If you can produce those six numbers for the year, with something behind each one, your accountant is happy and you are not reconstructing anything.
What eBay keeps for you
More than people think. eBay knows every sale, every fee it charged, every promoted listing charge, every label you bought through it, and every refund it processed. That is items one, three, most of four, and six.
The problem is where it keeps them: in reports you download by hand, in formats that change, with fees in one report and sales in another. It is all there. It is just not together, and it is not current unless you keep exporting.
What eBay cannot know
Two things, and they are the two that decide whether you made money.
Cost of goods. eBay has no idea what you paid at the estate sale. Without it, every report eBay produces is a sales report, not a profit report. This is the number you have to type, once, per item or per haul.
Everything off eBay. Storage unit, packaging orders, software, a sale you made at the market on Sunday. None of it touches eBay, so none of it is in any eBay report.
So the honest split is: eBay can supply four of the six numbers, and you have to supply cost of goods and business expenses. A bookkeeping system for a reseller is whatever makes those two easy to add and keeps the other four current without exporting.