Bookkeeping records for resellers, without pretending to be accounting software

What bookkeeping means for a reseller

Ask an accountant what bookkeeping is and you’ll hear about ledgers, accounts and reconciliations. Ask a reseller and you’ll hear about a shoebox of thrift receipts, a notes app full of half-sentences and the dread of February.

Both are describing the same need from different ends. Before anyone can do the accounting, someone has to keep the records: what you bought to resell, what it cost to run the business, and what customers paid. For a small resale business, that first part is where things go wrong. Sales happen at a mall checkout you never see, cash changes hands in a church parking lot, and the estate sale receipt was a handwritten slip that went through the wash.

Sellers Almanac works on that first part. It is not accounting software, and it never files taxes or gives tax advice. It keeps honest business records that you, and the preparer you work with, can rely on.

The three things to record

Every money event in a resale business fits one of three records:

• Purchases: what you spent sourcing goods to resell. Estate sale hauls, thrift finds, auction lots, a pallet of returns.
• Expenses: what it cost to run the business. Packing supplies, booth rent, paint and hardware, the flea market fee.
• Sales: what customers paid you, with sales tax kept apart.

Keeping purchases separate from expenses matters. They’re different kinds of cost, and anyone who later prepares your taxes will treat them differently. Your preparer can tell you exactly how.

A weekly bookkeeping routine, step by step

The routine below works with any system. It’s how Sellers Almanac is designed to be used.

1. Record at the moment. Record the purchase before you leave the estate sale, the expense at the supply store counter, the sale as the buyer drives off. A few taps now beats an hour of reconstruction later.
2. Add a note when context will fade. “Elm Street sale, two crocks and a quilt.” “Mall statement, first half of the month.” The amount is easy to remember for a day; where it came from is not.
3. Keep the paper too. An envelope per month in the glove box. Sellers Almanac doesn’t store receipt images yet, so the paper is still your backup.
4. Don’t guess what you don’t know. If the tax on a mall sale won’t be known until the statement arrives, leave it. The sale waits in Needs attention, and Sales and Sales tax collected say they’re incomplete rather than counting the tax as zero.
5. Once a week, clear the list. With the week’s receipts and statements in hand, open Needs attention and add any sales tax amounts you were waiting on.
6. Read the week. Check This week’s Spent and Sales. Do they look like the week you remember? A low Sales figure after a busy weekend usually means a sale didn’t get recorded.

Expenses that are easy to miss

Resellers tend to record the big sourcing spends and forget the small running costs. A few that slip through: packing tape and boxes, booth rent, price tags and labels, cleaning supplies, the parking fee at the flea market, the replacement hinge for a dresser. Small individually, they add up across a year. Whether and how each one matters for taxes is a question for your preparer; recording them is the part you can do today.

Where Sellers Almanac stops

Being plain about this is part of keeping records you can trust.

It records and totals what you enter; it does not connect to your bank, card or marketplace accounts, and no marketplace is connected today. It shows what you spent and what customers paid, but it does not produce profit figures. Reports on the web, tax-year review and export are planned for later phases. And it will never file your taxes or tell you what to deduct.

If you want to see how the pieces fit, start with recording in seconds and where the money went, or read how it works. Sourcing spend has its own guide in sourcing expense tracking, and if you’re coming from a spreadsheet, see the spreadsheet alternative.

Sellers Almanac is in founder testing on iPhone and isn’t available to download yet. There will be one price with every feature included; see pricing.