Tracking Physical Stock & Sales Fees

Hi,

Forgive me if I am missing something but I have looked through the forum and can’t find an exact solution to my question.

I have just recently started to sell physical items via Etsy. I currently manage stock using a simple spreadsheet but would like to move this into Manager in the future. This part is simple enough, I know I can set a sales price against an item but is there a way to automatically deduct a set percentage and amount from the sales total?

Currently I am simply putting the final amount I receive in as the transaction value but this means I am not tracking any fees accrued through Etsy sales which isn’t ideal.

Etsy charges a transaction fee (%), listing fee (flat amount) and a payment processing fee (flat amount) and I was wondering if there was a way to calculate this at the point of entry rather than having to create a separate transaction for the fees to ensure it all balances.

Thanks in advance for your help

You do not say what transaction you are using to record the sale and/or receive the income - do you raise a Sales Invoice and then Receive Money or do you just use the Receive Money transaction?

I don’t think there is a way to have Manager calculate the % fee but you could record it by adding a line to the invoice.
You should just simply add a line to enter the flat fee, using a negative number.

Be sure to read the Guides before deciding to use Manager to keep track of physical inventory. There are many different ways to do that - from the simple to the complicated.

Thanks for the reply.

I currently raise a sales invoice as Etsy doesn’t pay out on orders straight away, they do it once a month so this method allows me to track what payments are still outstanding.

I could add the fee as a separate line item I suppose - I guess I was looking at a bit of a cheat to get Manager to apply the discount for me automatically rather than me having to calculate it myself!

Who do you raise the sales invoice to, the end customer or Etsy?

I raise it against Etsy as that’s who makes the final payment to me.

If you can export a statement from Etsy, you might try importing that statement. Some third-party sales sites break up their accounting to you to show fees separately. Some bank rules could allocate the various portions automatically to income and expense accounts. Try this in a test business to see if and how it works. (I have no personal experience with Etsy.)

If you can’t do that successfully, you just need to add an additional line to your invoices for the fees. The exact amounts for each line will depend on how they categorize things. But essentially, you want the total amount of the sale to be shown and the fees to be deducted from that; thus, you would enter the fees as negative numbers on the sales invoice.

Thanks for the advice, I’ll see what export options Etsy has - and thanks for the tip about trying the import against a test business!

Another option would be to handle it similarly to how we handle credit card transactions. Create a “Etsy receivable” bank account.

Create each invoice in the name of the customer for tracking purposes, or etsy to keep it cleaner.
Receive Money against the invoice immediately (as soon as it is paid for by the customer) and use the bank account we just created. Add a line to the Bank Receipt and choose an expense account called Payment Processing or Etsy Fees etc. Enter a negative number for the amount of the fee paid to etsy.

At month end when the funds are transferred, simply do an inter account transfer from “Etsy Receivable” to your checking account.

This approach will allow you to book the receivables throughout the month so you always have a running total right at your fingertips rather than having to log in to Etsy to see the amount you will get paid at month end.

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Interesting idea. I’ll take a look

Unfortunately I can’t use the export directly from Etsy as it’s missing too much information and would need to heavily formatting so there will be some form of manual entry on my part