March 2019 Meeting Notes

ALL STAR ACCOUNTING PROFESSIONALS, INC.

Vice President Melissa Barton opened the March meeting.  Participants introduced themselves and gave shout outs.

·        Today’s topic: QuickBooks and e-Commerce.  Speakers: Alicia Katz Pollock of RoyalWise Solutions and Melissa Barton of SimpleBooks.  One of the hallmarks of e-commerce is the use of electronic payments via website shopping carts.  Amazon and Etsy were mentioned as two retail marketplaces.  The use of third-party merchant processing allows connection to payment processing.  Options for third party processing include Stripe/Authorize and PayPal. 

·        There are pros and cons of integrating electronic payment processing with QuickBooks.  Advantages include reporting and data hub.  Disadvantages include setup, maintenance and redundancy.

·        In discussing sales tax features, shopping carts generally work better than QuickBooks due to the setup work involved. 

·        QuickBooks and clients with inventory-  drop shipment inventory sales, like that used with Amazon, come into QuickBooks monthly.  Third party inventory solutions, such as SOS Inventory or Locate were brought up as better alternatives than QuickBooks.

·        Recording sales into QuickBooks can occur in various ways.

A.      Import actual sales.  This works well for repeat customers because customer names are in QuickBooks.

B.     Import generic sales

C.     Manage as clearing accounts:  Zapier- links any 2 apps; Webgility – maps e-commerce to QuickBooks

D.     Manually enter totals via adjusting journal entries or monthly sales receipts

·        Lightspeed is a point of sale system that connects to QuickBooks.  It is a good value and can map sales.  Ship Station allows customer tracking and creates barcodes.  A core question is what level of mapping is available.  The web designer should be interviewed as to the level of mapping that is available before they provide services. ShareARefund.com tracks shipments and automates shipping refunds if an item has not shipped timely.

·        Software solutions for sales activity include Shopify, Cloud Cart Connector and Webgility.  Zapier can create sales receipts for many e-commerce websites.  Another choice is to not use software but to import from the bank and use the banking rule to automate transaction entries.

·        Roadblocks and problems: 

1.      Returns or credits can be tracked in up to three places – in the shopping cart, at the merchant processor level or in QuickBooks. 

2.      Reconciliations – clearing accounts may not have statements – Shopify doesn’t have a statement.  Also inventory likely needs adjusting with returns.

·        Many business owners like using Stripe but it is harder on bookkeepers. 

·        The next meeting will be April 4, 2019.  The meeting topic will be “Tax Season – What worked and what didn’t work”.