How A2X and Financly are solving Shopify and Amazon accounting headaches
Financly is excited to share our interview with A2X! Click Here to go to the A2X Blog: A2X Blog – Welcome Financly
Welcome Financly Bookkeeping Solutions – A2X’s first Canadian Partner
We are excited to welcome Financly Bookkeeping Solutions as A2X’s first Canadian Partner. Teresa Slack is one of the two owners and founders of Financly Bookkeeping Solutions – a cloud-based, virtual bookkeeping service for modern businesses that need a dynamic accounting team.
With over 30 years of experience, she is not only skilled at financial record keeping and reporting, but also setting up systems, business management, sales and marketing, forecasting and much more. Teresa and her business partner Connie Smith are both Certified Professional Bookkeepers with the Institute of Professional Bookkeepers of Canada.
Financly’s focus is two fold. They are a full service bookkeeping firm offering virtual accounting services to eCommerce sellers throughout Canada and beyond, with a particular focus on Shopify accounting.
They also support the accounting and bookkeeping community by helping other accounting professionals with their Shopify and Amazon clients through providing training, advisory support and eCommerce integration services. For bookkeepers that aren’t as familiar with how online businesses work, this is a very useful offering.
In many ways, Teresa and her business partner, Connie Smith are on the leading edge of eCommerce bookkeeping in Canada (which is the home of Shopify).
“Ecommerce bookkeeping is hard! We can help make it easier, faster and less time consuming for sellers and the accounting professionals that love them”
Teresa Slack
From difficulty to ease
For many virtual CPAs and bookkeepers, the term ‘Shopify accounting’ is synonymous with technical issues and inaccuracies.
“We had been struggling using a number of other apps that just didn’t really cut it. We created work arounds, long procedures and lists of what NOT to do with these apps.”
Teresa Slack
Prior to A2X for Shopify, the process of accurately recording transactions in your bookkeeping system was a pain at the best of times. Some people used holding accounts to manage Shopify payouts; others would use the cash accounting method and record payments received as sales revenue – which makes it difficult to understand and compare financials between different sales channels and time periods.
There were other connector apps available, but Teresa found these to be fraught with difficulty. In other words, accurately recording revenues and fees from Shopify became an absolute pain for Teresa to manage.
But as with many of the solutions to life’s challenges, the answer came from an unexpected place…
“An accounting colleague who knows we focus on Shopify asked us if we could help one of his customers that had two Amazon stores. We said sure, why not, let’s learn Amazon. I started searching for a good integration app to bring Amazon data into Quickbooks Online and I stumbled upon A2X. Oh my! I am so very glad I did!”
Teresa Slack
Not only did she find the software to be simple and intuitive to operate, but she was thrilled with the level of support.
“The team at A2X are amazing, fast, patient, dedicated, smart and always listens to what their accounting partners have to say. They make adjustments and are open to and actually look for our input and suggestions. The A2X app is a dream to work with, it feels like magic!”
Teresa Slack
Why you should use an accounting connector?
Most online business tools are designed to solve a specific problem, but aren’t designed to integrate with other tools. One solution is to manually transfer data using spreadsheets and lots of detailed information.
The alternative is to invest in ‘connectors’ or integration apps that do the job seamlessly for you. A2X is one of those apps. It automatically connects data between Amazon or Shopifyand your cloud accounting system (Xero or Quickbooks).
This way, you have all the important information on hand to better manage and understand your business, whilst minimizing the time it takes to accurately record transactions.
“All the hard to find data in Amazon just miraculously comes into Quickbooks in a beautiful, organized journal entry. We love it.”
Teresa Slack
Here’s what it does:
Makes scaling easier – as your Amazon or Shopify store grows, the number of orders you import into your accounting software can quickly become overwhelming, making reconciling to your bank account a nightmare. While you can still see individual orders, with A2X you’ll also get summarized statements tied to each payout summary for fast and penny-perfect reconciliation.
Saves hours of reconciling each month – if you’re still manually reconciling your Shopify payouts, then removing the fee, refund or adjustment data, here’s the good news: A2X can do this for you automatically. With just a few clicks, you can setup A2X to run on autopilot.
Delivers more accurate bookkeeping – A2X brings through your Amazon or Shopify store data and allocates it in your accounting system. That means you always have reliable, accurate financial information at your fingertips (no more guesswork).
For more information about how A2X works, check out this video.
Made for Amazon and Shopify
A2X was originally developed to help Amazon sellers maintain an accurate and consistent set of financials using the accrual accounting method. Whilst it may seem easy to sell on Amazon at first, this apparent simplicity can be deceiving from a bookkeeping perspective.
This is due to the sheer volume of information available in Seller Central, and the way in which settlements payouts often span across two different months. As businesses grow, the increased level of complexity makes it even more difficult to keep on top of things.
After years of successfully helping Amazon merchants and their accountants, we decided to branch out to provide a similar offering for Shopify sellers that uses the settlement accounting method.
Teresa says:
“when we heard that A2X was now releasing a Shopify Version of their app, we were so excited. A2X generates a lovely summary journal entry that ties up all the different payment gateways, sales, returns, fees, etc. into a journal entry that perfectly matches up to the bank feed payouts for Shopify Payments.”
By putting all the different transaction types for each period into a summary journal entry, it makes bank reconciliation a breeze, allows customization to the appropriate level of detail required for each client and works for stores located anywhere in the world.
“No holding account is needed for Shopify Payments! I also love that with both apps, we can do the inventory asset and COGS entries to keep our clients inventory values up to date and accurate.”
Teresa Slack
Getting the books in order
Ecommerce accounting professionals like Teresa have seen Amazon and Shopify sellers trying to reconcile their books without A2X – and it’s difficult at the best of times. They waste time manually wading through data, struggling to apportion sales to the right financial periods and recording expenses in the wrong column of the income statement.
These issues are not just expensive and time consuming, but they can also cause real tax issues down the line. Sellers often end up inadvertently paying too much or too little tax, which can become a serious problem if they get audited.
As our first Canadian partner, we are thrilled to have Financly onboard as raving fans. It reduces the amount of administration required and means that Teresa’s team can spend more time with clients and helping to grow their businesses rather than sifting through mountains of confusing data.
Later this year, Teresa will be speaking about eCommerce at the Institute of Professional Bookkeepers of Canada (IPBC) annual conference in September (2019). During her presentation, she is going to cover the following topics:
How to get eCommerce platforms to talk nicely to accounting software.
What are the unique challenges of an eCommerce business?
How can we as accounting professionals help our eCommerce customers to be more successful?
Tickets are available here if you would like to attend the event.
“Our customers are really loving A2X, they like how easy it is to use, how reliable and accurate the eCommerce information is for them and they feel much more confident in their financial information all thanks to A2X. They have mentioned that they really like the live chat support that makes it super easy to get help on the fly as they are using A2X. A2X is now Financly’s #1 Recommended app for Shopify and Amazon eCommerce Sellers.”
Teresa Slack
If you would like to get in touch with Teresa for help with your eCommerce accounting requirements, she can be reached here:
Email: teresa.slack@financly.ca
Phone: (+1) 647-289-2512