23rd May, 2023
Properly integrated solutions for eCommerce accounting can make life easier at tax time. Here’s how Amaka works to make EOFY less taxing.
As one of the underlying principles of any business’s end of financial year (EOFY) activities, ongoing and accurate bookkeeping is key to success or failure.
At MYOB, we focus on making these processes as straightforward and frictionless as possible across a broad range of accounting and bookkeeping workflows, but eCommerce operators have the opportunity to extend this even further in their businesses.
With real-time inventory and sales data flowing from an eCommerce platform, the opportunity to integrate this information with your accounting platform has the potential to make the traditional EOFY crunch period a thing of the past — that’s where Amaka comes in.
READ: eCommerce accounting: Easy integration from front-end to back
As an integrator, Amaka enables businesses to capture data flows from their eCommerce platform and pipe them directly into MYOB, solving key challenges around recordkeeping, accounts and taxation. And this is the reason Amaka’s CFO, Martin Chee, is a true evangelist for the company’s software.
“I started my career as an accountant in a boutique accounting firm and over 15 years I worked on a wide range of business challenges,” he said.
“Implementing software to achieve efficiencies for small and medium businesses has always been at the core of Amaka’s mission and that’s led us to begin driving positive change in the eCommerce accounting space.”
In particular, Chee sees Amaka delivering a heap of value for businesses by removing the administrative burden of what are usually tedious, but necessary, processes.
“I wanted to build an accounting integration that could automate data entry and fast-track bank reconciliations.
“As an accountant myself, I know the importance of having deep and flexible integrations that allow for customisation.”
The result is a solution designed by CPAs that can sync data between very different platforms while remaining structured in such a way that’s both useful to business owners and that adheres to rigorous accounting standards.
“The flexible solutions allow for custom mapping, summarised and categorised grouping, cost-of-goods-sold sync, and more,” he said.
eCommerce operations in Australia see spikes in online sales during periods such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas, this in turn can result in a high-volume backlog of transactions that need to be manually entered and reconciled before reporting deadlines.
Data entry, bank reconciliations, stocktake and inventory reconciliations, receivables and payables reconciliations as well as adjustments required for tax compliance are all tasks that can stack up throughout the year for eCommerce businesses.
“Many business operators ignore these processes until EOFY arrives and are left playing catch up with the large workload required to update their accounting books and ensure their transactions are appropriately mapped and reconciled,” said Chee.
But, by using an accounting integration that automatically syncs an unlimited number of transactions on a daily basis, eCommerce businesses don’t have to worry about these types of issues.
“And for those who already have a backlog, Amaka also offers a historical sync option that allows customers to sync up to 12 months of historical data.”
With an eCommerce accounting integration, data entry is automated and occurs in a timely manner (on a daily basis), bank reconciliations can be fast-tracked and costs of goods can be synced to help businesses track their profitability day-to-day.
“In the process of syncing transactions, relevant taxes and selling expenses are automatically accounted for, taking a lot of the manual accounting aspects off the shoulders of business operators and giving them more time to focus on other core value adding activities,” said Chee.
Another core benefit of eCommerce that can also represent a challenge at EOFY is the ‘borderless’ nature of online sales.
Being able to sell products and services to people on the other side of the world opens up huge potential for added revenue, but it also adds complications when it comes to complying with tax laws.
The good news is that Amaka has already solved this situation.
“Amaka’s solutions are currently able to handle the intricacies of global tax jurisdictions,” confirmed Chee. “This was an important feature to support across our eCommerce solutions given the cross-border nature of eCommerce selling.
“Being an API-driven solution, our integrations are able to capture all tax values and codes from the user’s eCommerce platform and ensure they are appropriately accounted for within the user’s MYOB system.”
Another key aspect of getting tax time sorted means liaising with advisors to ensure your business is maximising any deductions and paying the correct amount of tax.
With the huge amounts of data involved, an eCommerce business could quickly find it challenging to interface with bookkeepers and accountants, adding significant amounts of time into the equation on both sides.
“The most common conversation we’re having with accounting and bookkeeping practices using Amaka revolves around the time savings from automation.
“Not only does this lead to increased productivity, professionals are also seeing increased margins as well — a key benefit from having up-to-date and accurate accounts.
Without an accounting integration, accountants and bookkeepers typically must export a CSV file or sales report from their client’s eCommerce platform, manually categorise and map them into the correct accounts before reconciliation.
With automation, these processes run in the background. Automated data entry and fast-tracked reconciliation practices can easily start to save business operators hours of admin every month.
“Reducing the time spent on repetitive administrative tasks also allows for better servicing of the client by way of increasing the time available for discussions about business performance.”
In short, properly integrated eCommerce accounting means more time left for getting work done on the client’s side, and more time to focus on value-added advisory services for accountants and bookkeepers (time to revisit that pricing strategy, anyone?).
Shopify + MYOB
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Amazon, eBay, WooCommerce + MYOB (coming soon)
Amaka’s freemium pricing model offers eCommerce businesses enterprise-level solutions without incurring significant cost with access to 24/7 support via one-on-one. Find out more via the MYOB App Marketplace, today.