Uncategorized

Avoid getting lost in the Amazon Seller digital jungle.

Selling on Amazon is like getting lost in a digital jungle among thousands of other sellers. Amazon’s services do not cover your store’s day-to-day financials and accounting.

When it comes to your finances, ask yourself a few questions:

  • Are you collecting sales tax from the correct territories?
  • Have you calculated your Cost of Goods Sold correctly?
  • Are your books showing you the full financial picture of your business?
  • Do you really want to do all of this on your own?
  • Are you keeping proper track of your Amazon seller financial transactions?
  • Or, are you feeling like you don’t know what you don’t know?

Without solid bookkeeping and accounting, you might find your eCommerce business in some difficulties, especially once tax filing season comes around.

Insogna CPA specializes in eCommerce and Amazon selling accounting services. We don’t need to learn how it works. We can hit the ground running on day one. You can expect fast turnaround times, accurate records, and a true partner to help you through the financial side of your business.

In addition to accurate bookkeeping and accounting records, we also assist you in tax planning and paying the right taxes throughout the year.

With accurate financial statements, you can easily see and match payments, determine extra commissions, know which orders remain unpaid, and more.

Are you making a profit?

Tracking your day-to-day financial transactions is crucial. Without up-to-date accounting, you won’t know whether you’re truly earning a profit or simply making sales. It will also be difficult to gauge the success and viability of your Amazon store.

Make the Right Decisions

Always know where your money is. Documented daily operations assist you in making the right financial decisions as your business grows.

If all you need is your accounting done right, that’s okay. If you want tax planning guidance, payroll assistance, or direction on selling your business, we can help with that too.

Contact Insogna CPA to learn more about how we can help you take your Amazon store to greater heights.

You Might Also Like

Automated Bookkeeping for eCommerce Sellers

We take your accounting worries away by creating monthly Balance Sheets and Profit & Loss statements you’ll be able to interpret and analyze over time.

Our team reconciles the sales data and organizes in a way that you can track of what’s happened in previous months and predict what your finances should look like.

Be on top of your cash flow and feel prepared for tax season, raising capital, and scaling your business with clean and consistent accounting.

Know your real-time financial situation so you can make data-driven decisions and solve problems proactively instead of reactively.

eCommerce Accounting Channels

We specialize in a variety of eCommerce accounting channels, including:

  • Multi-sales channel operations
  • Merchant account reconciliation
  • Website sales
  • Amazon
  • Ebay
  • Shopify
  • Retailers
  • Wholesalers

Top eCommerce Business Challenges + The Solution

How can you keep up with your eCommerce accounting when you also have partners to meet, logistics to worry about, and a business to run? Then, as your business grows, you’ll have increased compliance requirements, new markets to enter, and compounded tax challenges.

It’s impossible to do it all yourself. And, you’re not alone. Here are the top, four eCommerce business challenges we’ve identified; plus, how to solve them.

  • Sales Tax Liability—Over the past few years, eCommerce sales tax has gotten more complicated for the eCommerce business owner. Online retailers need to remit tax in nearly every area in which they sell. But, some challenges do it electronically while others require specialized knowledge of tax laws.
  • Seller Fees—Complex fee structures can be a challenge to track. There can be fees for transactions, listing, order fulfillment, advertising, and more. Without the right tools in place, this could leave you spinning.
  • Ruinous Records—Disorganized books can cause a lot of problems, such as fraud, deceitful tactics, and internal control nightmares.
  • Growing Pains and Money Management—With a limited understanding of your company’s profitability and the correct way to manage business finances, you may have a huge hurdle to cross.

With your busy schedule, the thought of trying to handle complex business accounting on your own can be overwhelming. That’s why Insogna CPA works with you to help you grow your business.

Take advantage of our expertise rather than spending time looking, hiring, and maintaining an in-house accounting team. Give us a call today.

You Might Also Like

 

Accounting Experts For eCommerce Sellers

Stressed out? We help eCommerce and online sellers to drive profitable results by taking the bookkeeping headache away.

We understand your challenges. That’s why we focus on using our eCommerce accounting experience to help you and your business to reach their full potential.

Avoid taking a reactive approach to your bookkeeping by trying to fix problems after they’ve happened. Our team helps you make the most of your data by preventing financial mistakes without the stress of trying to manage them yourself. We help sellers like you with:

Take back your time and grow your wealth with customized, monthly business accounting solutions tailored to your needs.

Grow smarter with the perfect fit. Smarter technologies. Seamless processes. Everything you need to streamline your back-office.

Avoid the bookkeeping headaches. Work with a team that knows eCommerce, like Insogna CPA, inside and out. Give us a call today.

You Might Also Like

eCommerce Business Stages – Profits $1 million+ continued

Doing omnichannel marketing may also have you looking to expand into the global marketplace. Content personalization, omnichannel marketing, expansion into the global marketplace, automation, and so on. “At this level, you need a combination of resources to run your business most effectively” (Scharf, 2018).

Where do you go from here?

Outsourcing may be required for global expansion operations, and having a strong CPA team helping strategize on the financial impacts of expansion is critical here. This is where a fractional CFO can help.

Your accounting team is checking all your numbers regularly, and in most cases at this level in real-time. Your virtual controller is helping forecast and plan. And now your fractional CFO will help ensure that every  financial box is being checked when expanding into omnichannel and international sales. “In the past, complicated taxes and high shipping costs have made expanding sales overseas a major challenge for SMBs, but new technology has lowered the barriers for small businesses looking to take advantage of untapped markets” (D’Angelo, 2018).”

Technology, as a whole, will be central to your eCommerce business’ growth and progress. From accounting to inventory to sales to taxes, you’ll want a strategy making sure all of these systems are talking with one-another and creating as much automated efficiency to keep any unnecessary human interaction out as much as possible. “The Shopify/ReCharge combination for subscription recurring billing comes to mind. These services work great together, but they become questionable as massive growth occurs. This is mainly due to the two components not being able to pass data back and forth in real-time, making manual data entry and reporting a bottleneck for scaling” (Hubbard, 2020). As your business has now experienced massive growth, you may need to take a closer look at the technological foundation that supports your company’s processes and creates your customers’ experiences.

Doing a thorough overhaul of your technology systems and network processes may feel like a tedious task, but it’s one that is well worth pursuing.

First, it’s essential that your software is not only providing the best possible consumer experience on the front-end, but also that the back-end systems are accessible and collaborative. Your business process commerce architecture is an essential tool that will help your team communicate better, work more efficiently, and stay agile in their actions to meeting your businesses goals.

Second, refining your tech stack is a great way to increase performance and multiply profit margins. Doing this will also allow your CPA team to perform more tasks through software automation and review more data accessed in real-time, enhancing your business’ operational  capabilities and doubling down on your financial health. “Be diligent with these details because they are what can make or break you” (Thomason, 2020).

tech stack
"Outstanding service, knowledge and support. I would highly recommend this firm to anyone for personal or business tax or financial assistance. A big differentiated benefit they offer over others is they run everything digitally, so there are no more physical papers to deal with - yeah!! Great job Insogna - hope I get more opportunities to work with you and recommend others do also."

With your plan to continue scaling your business, you’ll need to invest time, people, and resources into researching new and upcoming technologies to support your growth. “A focus on scalability means investing in the business’ overall commerce architecture, the ecosystem of software components that are used to operate the business. This includes the e-commerce platform, CMS, ERP, CRM, OMS, PIM, marketing suites, analytics and reporting, etc.” (Hubbard, 2020). A valuable CPA team can help advise on your tech-stack so that you’re creating as much technological efficiency as possible at this level. Streamlining at this level will only make your life easier, and can cause your personal wealth to move into ‘auto-pilot’ mode, as you breeze past your projected annual profits.

Depending on your goals, your Phase 4 will look different. You may be intent on maintaining your lifestyle, determined to grow by a marginal amount each year, or focused on continued expansion by accelerating into omnichannel eCommerce sales. An experienced CPA team of advisors, coaches and strategizers that are working together to help you achieve your goals is an invaluable piece of the eCommerce selling puzzle, one that exists solely so that you can do your job better.

Whichever Phase you find your business in today, don’t put your success in the hands of unlicensed ‘Craigslist’ bookkeepers.

Get a CPA firm aligned with your vision who charges a fixed monthly price for all of your anticipated CPA needs, and who provides you with unlimited communication and access. Insogna CPA’s team of experts is here to help you when you’re ready.

eCommerce Business Stages – Profits $1 million+

You are now truly running an enterprise. You’re managing people, not just products. You’re selling on multiple channels, or considering doing so. You have more processes than you know what to do with, and they all must be able to communicate effectively with one another to efficiently get results that help you make strategic decisions.

Does this sound like you?

  • Your online business is seriously successful.
  • You have staff working for you, and your HR needs are growing.
  • You want strategic advice on how to grow and keep your wealth.
  • Your commercial space needs are growing.
  • You’re paying more taxes than ever and want to know how to pay less.
  • You’re thinking about expanding sales channels.
ecommerce phase 4
business woman 500x500 1

Your vision for your business stretches out in front of you now, expanding and multiplying towards the horizon. Your day at work is long, and your work day is even longer. You feel like you can’t work at the rate necessary to keep up with your growth of your business. But you also are finding it difficult to relinquish control and delegate, at least for right now, as you are just beginning the process of hiring adequate personnel to staff your blooming eCommerce company.

Your business has outgrown your home, and you likely have commercial space or are in the market for more space as you grow. And you have been able to fund the business, but additional capital is needed to get your business to that next level and you’re not sure where to begin. Your hopes are high, your energy is high, but your profits are not (yet) as high as you’d like them to be, and you can feel the pressure.

“An established business has proven itself in terms of being able to survive in a competitive marketplace, but that competition doesn’t go away as a business evolves” (Hubbard, 2020). Now is not the time to rest…at least, not yet. You must continue innovating, continue creating efficiencies, and continue forecasting your financial needs in real-time in order to reach a place of comfortable sustainability. This is where a valuable advisory CPA can help.

Our philosophy with our clients has always been to have an annual retirement contribution strategy, and let their businesses’ value be a ‘bonus’ when sold in the future. This way, over the course of many years, the business owner has accumulated a large savings balance and growing recurring dividends so the business owner can retire when they want – not based on when the business can be sold and the value they hope to get for their years of hard work. – Chase Insogna, President of Insogna CPA

The first step to growing any business successfully is people. Making the right hires that help take your business from ‘y’ to ‘z’ is critical as you only have enough bandwidth for existing tasks in a 24-hour work day. And while working 24/7 is sustainable for a while, burn-out can set in, and worsen your health. Outsourcing these days is easy with today’s technology.

Hiring the right CPA firm team of experts can be helpful taking care of your accounting, payroll, virtual controller, fractional CFO, and tax strategist needs.

An immediate benefit of hiring a CPA team is that you will have an entire accounting department at your disposal for ongoing expertise. “For about the same price as hiring a bookkeeper, you can pay for a fraction of [the total cost] to get an entire accounting department to support you the way your business should be supported.” (Scharf, 2018)

accounting payroll tax

Apart from using different devices, another reality of marketing today is that prospects might have to use channels such as social media, email, phone, and others during interactions with your business. With omnichannel marketing, you can integrate all these interactions together so that you can deliver your brand messages to prospects. Furthermore, it helps you to reduce friction during the buying process and increase conversions. According to Invesp, companies with omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain 89% of their customers while companies without omnichannel customer engagement strategies only retain 33%.

— Bullock (2020)

"I first started working with the team for my small business--they were the only accounting firm who explained things to me in a straightforward way. We had them handle our personal taxes as well and were very pleased with the service we received. We've now kept them as our accountants through closing my small business, changing jobs, hiring different nannies, and moving across the country. Straightforward pricing and a responsive group who clearly know their stuff!"

Instead of outsourcing your accounting needs to multiple people in multiple roles, hiring an entire accounting department means that communication will be efficient and effective, and all of the important players in your financial sphere will be able to actually talk to one-another. This increased efficiency internally helps with your overall goals – business and personal – as each person in the CPA firm is familiar with your business, financial forecasts, and work internally together to help reach your goals with you. Outsourcing to the right CPA team can help focus more of your efforts on continuing to build your successful eCommerce business and put more time back on your schedule for things you love – outside of work.

personal wealth

Now that your business is established, you likely find yourself with the ability to build your personal wealth and meet your future retirement goals. The majority of business owners we initially meet with do not have any plan for retirement, other than continuing to invest in their business. We find this strategy horribly mis-directed. A business owner rarely gets all of the blood, sweat and tears when they look for a buyer on the cusp of (or ready for) retirement.

Where you decide to invest your hard-earned profits is something that your accounting team can help advise you with. “Whether you’re planning out how you’ll spend a loan or how you’ll spend your monthly operating expenses budget, getting a handle on your cash flow is something you need to do before you make any big investment decisions” (Odjick, 2020). Your CPA will quickly be able to tell you what your current available cash flow looks like, and how far you can potentially stretch it to meet your goals.

Another area of significant interest at this stage of your growing business is potentially omnichannel marketing as you expand from one selling platform to two or many…