How to Save More Than 90% on Ecommerce Bookkeeping Costs

A simple case for changing the course of your business—and your life—with automation.

These days sellers conduct business through a number of channels—both offline and online. These can include a cash register at a brick-and-mortar location, a selling platform (or store) like Magento or Shopify, a custom website with a shopping cart extension like WooCommerce, on marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, and even a point of sale tool like Square. So when it comes to accurately inputting all that sales data into inventory, shipping, and accounting systems, life for a multichannel seller gets very complicated very quickly. And the complexity is multiplied tenfold not if, but when, human involvement introduces errors. Typically when sales hit a peak or the business scales in some way, either the repetitive manual entry becomes too much for a busy seller to manage or hiring a bookkeeper becomes too expensive to justify. In fact, the data management has been the undoing of many a burgeoning business.#Datamanagement is time-consuming and expensive. Here's what to do about it and save money. #Webgility #Ecommerce Click To Tweet

Either way sellers are conflicted: The ones who handle their own bookkeeping know their time is better spent growing the business with marketing, networking, researching lower-cost vendors, reviewing workflows—the list goes on. And those who pay to outsource data entry and bookkeeping are often left wondering if they’ll ever be free of an expense that scales in tandem with their business.    

Great news, there is a better way. By automating your ecommerce data, it’s possible to save as much as 94% of your bookkeeping costs. That’s money that could be invested back in the business and time that could be spent focused on what you love to do—which, for most, is not data entry. Although most ecommerce businesses have far more layers (including multiple channels, expenses, fees, inventory, shipping, etc.) and is far more expensive, let’s walk through the simple math of this significant savings:

At a minimum, if you process 1,000 orders/month and pay a bookkeeper $20/hour on data entry at a rate of approximately 5 minutes/order, your monthly bookkeeping costs would be $1,667 or $20,000 annually.

And if you enter your own data, you’d spend at least 83 hours/month creating spreadsheets and manually typing or copy-pasting order information to and from multiple business systems and processes, which includes, but is not limited to, creating a sales receipts, confirming product availability, updating inventory, recording customer information, and managing shipping. Numbers don’t quite work for you? Plug in your own and see how it shakes out. 

When it comes to time wasted, money spent, and errors avoided, the solution is simpler than you think. Automating ecommerce data can make all the costs, headaches, and errors go away for good. With the right solution, you can move a single, accurate set of sales data throughout your accounting and business systems with the click of a button for as little as $100/month. You can also sync and track revenue, orders, and expenses without introducing costly human error.

Numbers aside, life’s too short to spend it running around after your data. Automation can fix just about anything that’s ailing an ecommerce business. After all, properly aggregated, accurate data can help you find insights on what’s selling, who’s buying, where, and why. With the perspective automation and analytics provide, you stand a far better chance of both succeeding in ecommerce and enjoying the journey.