biophase
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A hectic month on my ecommerce stores has brought up a new issue. With over 100 orders this month I am finding myself bogging down in paperwork and an accounting mess.
I run a dropship only business so a sale comes in via credit card, paypal or google checkout. I log the sale into an excel spreadsheet which includes general information such as sale price, shipping, tax on the left side. On the right side I log in my cost for the item, and my shipping price (if known at the time). This then punches out a general profit calculation for that specific order which doesn't include CC fees.
I place an order through my dropship companies the same day using a credit card. The only thing I don't know is my cost of shipping. I have a UPS/Fedex account that bills my CC after it has been delivered. I find out my ship costs about 2 weeks later.
Here are my total steps in processing an order:
Read order email
Copy email to text file
Create packing slip
Log order in excel spreadsheet (mentioned above)
Send order to dropshippers
Not too bad, takes about 3 minutes per order. I think the only way to make it faster is to automate it.
(in the following days)
Make sure order has shipped
Enter tracking number into Ecommerce system for customers
Check bank account for ACH deposit against my orders
Check credit card charges against orders with dropshipper
Enter actual UPS/Fedex shipping costs into excel spreadsheet
This is the crap that takes up alot of time. With hundreds of orders, trying to match credit card transactions and bank deposits is just time consuming. Then going through each Fedex charge and entering it into my spreadsheet sucks too.
As you can see it's not exactly a 4hour work week.
I am trying to streamline this approach because I feel like I am doing double or triple work. I'd ideally like to touch an order once and have all its pertinent data stored in one location.
So I recently downloaded the free Quickbooks and am trying it out. Quickbooks seems great, but I can't imagine entering every single order into there? Is this how everyone else does it? Do you create a PO against every order sent to the dropshipper? I can see that this is the cleanest way, but do stores making thousands of orders a month actually do this?
I'd like to hear how others with ecommerce stores do their books!
I run a dropship only business so a sale comes in via credit card, paypal or google checkout. I log the sale into an excel spreadsheet which includes general information such as sale price, shipping, tax on the left side. On the right side I log in my cost for the item, and my shipping price (if known at the time). This then punches out a general profit calculation for that specific order which doesn't include CC fees.
I place an order through my dropship companies the same day using a credit card. The only thing I don't know is my cost of shipping. I have a UPS/Fedex account that bills my CC after it has been delivered. I find out my ship costs about 2 weeks later.
Here are my total steps in processing an order:
Read order email
Copy email to text file
Create packing slip
Log order in excel spreadsheet (mentioned above)
Send order to dropshippers
Not too bad, takes about 3 minutes per order. I think the only way to make it faster is to automate it.
(in the following days)
Make sure order has shipped
Enter tracking number into Ecommerce system for customers
Check bank account for ACH deposit against my orders
Check credit card charges against orders with dropshipper
Enter actual UPS/Fedex shipping costs into excel spreadsheet
This is the crap that takes up alot of time. With hundreds of orders, trying to match credit card transactions and bank deposits is just time consuming. Then going through each Fedex charge and entering it into my spreadsheet sucks too.
As you can see it's not exactly a 4hour work week.
I am trying to streamline this approach because I feel like I am doing double or triple work. I'd ideally like to touch an order once and have all its pertinent data stored in one location.
So I recently downloaded the free Quickbooks and am trying it out. Quickbooks seems great, but I can't imagine entering every single order into there? Is this how everyone else does it? Do you create a PO against every order sent to the dropshipper? I can see that this is the cleanest way, but do stores making thousands of orders a month actually do this?
I'd like to hear how others with ecommerce stores do their books!
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