I am taking over the books for an Ebay powerseller and he is my first client. I have to input all his receipts, invoices etc from September 2007 as the previous bookkeeper has left them in a real mess. I am having to start again from scratch.
What I wanted to check, was that the previous bookkeeper entered the Paypal sales, fees and returns by printing off a Paypal summary and entered the total as one amout and one entry onto the spreadsheet. Do you think that it would be better if I entered them into the spreadsheet indiviually, or are the totals enough. There are maybe 20-50 sales a month at the moment. My client has given me secondary access to his Paypal account so I will be able to access all the records that I need, just need to work through all the info.
There are so many pieces of paper, a huge box full which I have put in month and year order, just feeling a little daunted at the moment as he is my first client and I want to do a really good job.
It would certainly be easier in the short term to enter totals however i would tend towards entering individual amounts purely for the fact that if any are queried at a later date then they can be pin pointed more easily.
i had to enter 7 months works of source documents for a busy retail outlet, pain in the **** but i entered everyone individually. i am glad i did now as i have had to go back and look at them several times now.
I have run my bookkeeping business since August 2006. I have not had a client that had ebay sales. In December 2008 I went into another business combined with the bookkeeping with my husband as a Limited Company, and recently as another revenue stream of our business started ebay selling (had previously enjoyed this selling my own books etc when I had finished with them. Even though it can take time the best way I have found to deal with ebay sales is to have a customer sales account simply called Ebay sales. Then each ebay invoice I enter as an invoice on Sage on ebay sales account, have the item as a description including ebay invoice number, then another line has customer name. I then have a bank account nominal on sage called paypal so then allocate the paypal payments to the customer ebay sales. Then put the paypal fees on as a bank payment on the paypal bank account.
If you keep the backing information together, filed properly it really shouldn't be an issue tracking back individual items - and the little bit of time spent on those occassions will probably be marginal compared to the time you spend entering every individual items... just make sure it's all kept and filed properly.
You really only need to enter the totals for a reporting period (week/month/quarter etc), but I'd definitely keep the Sales, Fees, and Returns totals separate from each other as these will make a difference with ratios and KPIs.
Then if adjustments are needed - just reference the month and the individual transaction within the period and you should be ok.
No need to spend more time than is necessary entering transactions. It just wastes your time, costs the client more and you're left with a larger ongoing job - better to put the time in setting up an efficient system and processes for it all.
Only exception I'd seriously consider for this - is if the data is electronic and you can setup a quick import for it.
