Bookkeeping and Accounting Services for E-commerce

We are living in a time-scale, where the internet has proven to be a game-changer, forcing many organizations to restructure their physical offices into complete online stores. This new cloud commercial arena, THE E-COMMERCE, has not only made 24/7 buying and selling faster but it is also an easier platform for reaching customers without geographical limitations. Even though the way to conduct business has transformed, the accounting requirements yet remain the same. Applying the same old traditional rules to your advanced online transactions makes e-commerce accounting even more complex. And as it is said:

‘The life and death of your e-commerce business entirely depends on how you manage your accounting’

Mistakenly using the wrong accounting software or applying wrong accounting treatments could lead to:

• Inventory mismanagement,
• Issues in the integration and reconciliation between payment gateway and accounting software
• Inaccurate tax calculations on online sales,
• Failure to figure out shipping logistics,
• Payroll incompliance and,
• Simply waste of your time, assets and reputation.

E-commerce business comes with a massive host of accounting and bookkeeping challenges, so whether you hire a professional or do your own bookkeeping using accounting software, complete understanding to deal with intricacies of e-commerce bookkeeping is essential.

PUSH DIGITS CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS is one of the oldest accounting firms in UAE who is engaged with a massive number of trading companies for audit as well as bookkeeping and accounting services.  We can help you in the accounting of your trading business and let you focus on your core business i.e trading.

Why Should You Outsource Your E-Commerce Accounting?

Having your e-commerce store is one of the most thrilling ventures as an entrepreneur or a large business owner but just purchasing a domain name, setting up the website, and getting the store running is not enough.

WITHOUT a sound financial system, your online store will fall into a mass of mismanagement. Once your store goes live into the virtual market, you need to have a well-organized integrated ERP system to record complicated transactions. You need to keep a strong eye on your company’s everyday financial information, having up-to-date data of all your operations. But with this online store, where your products are available night and day, throughout the whole globe, managing all that multiplex bookkeeping is not only time consuming but a fairly back-breaking task.

Although there are a number of factors that emphasize the importance of benefits outsourcing e-commerce bookkeeping, below are some of the most important reasons that companies outsource their e-commerce accounting:

1. Calculating sales tax liability for all those mass global transactions can be confusing. How can you be sure that you’re not paying more than what you really have to pay?
2. Fees and software cost can easily eat up all your profits. How can you make sure to fight for the most reasonable costs?
3. Managing that tremendous transaction volume with all that composite data can prove to be a challenge. How can you find intelligent ways to batch your transactions?
4. With online stores, sale returns from customers are not unusual. How can you customize your system to update inventory when products are returned by customers and incorporate a system control that keeps sending you alerts until your physical inventory reconciles with your system?
5. Customer payments are first received by merchant/payment gateway such as Network International, Skrill, 2Checkout, PayPal, Pioneer, Secure Pay, POS machines etc. and then transferred to your company bank accounts. How can you automate the entire sales to receipt process in your system?
6. E-commerce business inventory management can be complex. How to know what level of inventory do you have, what is the inventory turnover, what is the re-order level, and how to accurately value it?
7. E-commerce reporting is yet another challenge whereby your sales and stocks can be seen online and costs are in the accounting system. How can you combine the data from these two sources and generate meaningful information for analysis?

You probably need a trusted advisor to help you find the answers to all of these confusing questions, and to go into further details, if the accounting system of your E-commerce business is:

• Unable to talk to your e-commerce website,
• Unable to integrate with payment gateway,
• Unable to produce batch-wise costing,
• Unable to show batch-wise profitability reports,
• Unable to categorize agent-wise sales,
• Unable to produce area-wise data,
• Unable to construct agent-wise commissions reports,
• Unable to differentiate between website sales and retailer sales,
• Not providing you monthly/quarterly/annual profit & loss reports,
• Unable to give you accurate tax figures,
• Not performing proper reconciliations of transactions e.g stock in hand vs stock in system,
• Unable to prepare projected financial information based on the historic financial records already in the system,

And if YOU as an owner of your e-commerce store are:

• Unable to get accurate inventory/sales reports,
• Constantly missing reporting deadlines by authorities,
• Facing trouble taking benefits of tax deductions,
• Unable to analyze the market competition,
• Unable to categorize your most beneficial online articles and
• Losing track of your transaction records

Without having a sound bookkeeping and accounting system, you’ll only end up going towards a SHUT-DOWN. One of the most frequent mistakes that e-commerce companies make is getting the books organized and hiring qualified accountants a little too late.

You need reliable and industry-specific accounting firms to help you organize your systems. We can help you establish a fully integrated ERP system for your e-commerce business which will not only eliminate manual tasks currently done by your team but will also provide you auto reconciliations, stock reports, any kind of sales reports, direct integration with payment gateway, and most importantly highly effective internal control system. Push Digits is the ONLY accounting firm in UAE that provides fully integrated e-commerce accounting services which till date has proved to be a bulletproof defense for our clients.

What is Included in Our E-Commerce Accounting Services?

If you have your books right, everything else will fall into place

A detailed chart of our e-commerce accounting services includes:

1. Business Understanding:
   • Develop an understanding of your online business set-up,
   • Determine how the management wants to track its sales,
   • Advice the most suitable payment gateway for your online transactions,
   • Evaluate which cloud/desktop software will suit your needs effectively,
   • Provide you with a detailed comparison report of software costs & fees,
   • Understanding your e-commerce business to offer the most suitable packages
2. Management of Accounting Software for E-commerce Transactions:
   • Determination of the most appropriate and cost-effective accounting software that works well with your online platform (Zoho Books, QuickBooks, SAP, SAGE, XERO, Tally, etc),
   • Set-up and implementation of the Software,
   • System customization to achieve specific reporting requirements,
   • System setup for automatic generation of VAT reports to be filled with the Federal Tax Authority,
   • System customization for automatic reconciliation with Federal Customs Authority ,
   • Integration of your system with PayPal, WooCommerce, Network International, POS, Banks, etc. to initiate and account for direct feeds from merchant and payment gateway to your software. This integration achieves auto recording of sales and receipts,
   • Enable the software to automatically register transactions in e-commerce platform,
   • Set up descriptive layouts for invoices, quotes, emails, users, suppliers, organization details,
   • Incorporation and setup of accurate functionalities for Value Added Tax (VAT) recordings and reporting,
   • Initial and on-going set up of the Chart of Accounts to ensure transactions are classified and recorded in correct general ledger accounts which is essential for accurate reporting, ,
   • Customized management reporting templates (monthly, quarterly, and annual) as per requirements.
3. Management of E-commerce Business Transactions (either through enabling/customizing the accounting software or providing bookkeeping services):
   • Daily reconciliations of e-commerce transactions between the e-commerce platform and accounting software,
   • Detailed batch-wise costing for greater insight into your business,
   • Categorizing area-wise sales to identify the most profitable zones/markets,
   • Detailed breakdown of website and retailer sales of your business so that you have a clear of your e-commerce business revenue,
   • Regular sales reconciliations,,
   • Cash transaction reconciliations,
   • Calculation and accounting of merchant fees charged by the merchant service provider,
   • Automation of bank reconciliation for receipts through POS machines/payment gateway, online portals, etc. by directly integrating with the merchant service providers,
   • Timely and accurate recording of sales-refund,sales through credit card and gift cards, stock write off etc.,
     Separate recording of international sales in different currencies.
4. Management & Analysis of E-commerce Operations Costs:
   • Maintenance of monthly product-wise marketing expenditure,
   • Maintenance of general overall marketing expenditure,
   • Maintenance of monthly costs of general overheads, salaries and other overheads,
   • Item-wise cost allocation for comparison of costs of multiple trading items,
   • Production of the detailed structure of product-wise platform fees, so that you have a clear picture of costs being charged by platforms,
   • Calculation of cost of shipping based on the population of trading consignments and country-wise rates,
   • Product-wise shipping cost allocation,
   • Recording and accurate allocation of refund shipping fees for cancelled sales/purchases,
   • Accurate computation, recording, and posting of discounts allowed,
   • Appropriate recording and treatment of refund liabilities,
   • Providing bookkeeping and e-commerce accounting software training to members of the management,
   • Monitoring and timely evaluation of system discrepancies,
   • Separate recordings of cash withdrawals,
   • Computation and review of accounting and bookkeeping for previous periods.
5. Filing of Tax Returns for E-commerce Transactions:
   • Incorporation and setup of accurate functionalities for Value Added Tax (VAT),
   • Enabling the software to accurately calculate and collect tax on the online sales,
   • VAT training to clients’ staff
   • Separate recording of sales tax amount from e-commerce gross sales,
   • Accurate calculation of sale tax liability by taking account of tax reliefs as per regulations,
   • Timely filing of sales tax returns to avoid hefty penalties from the Federal Tax Authority (FTA).
   • Act as tax consultants in UAE for all the clients who have signed up for e-commerce accounting services.
6. E-commerce Inventory and Order Management:
   • Integration and set-up of inventory tracking into e-commerce accounting software,
   • Inventory valuation as per International Accounting Standards (IAS)
   • Timely and accurate recording of sales and sales returns to produce accurate figures of inventory re-stock,
   • Regular reconciliations across order placement channels,
   • Calculation and accurate treatment of gifted articles or gift cards,
   • Monthly reconciliations between dispatched orders across fulfilment channels,
   • Separate recordings of local and international orders,
   • Separate computation and recording of unsold stocks.
7. Reporting:
   1. Overall Business Position Report: Enabling you to evaluate the effectiveness of your entire e-commerce structure. This will help you to quickly see the main profit/loss indicators so you can take actions based on current business efficiency.
   2. ROPO Analysis Report (research online, purchase offline): Enabling you to visualize how online ads are affecting your physical/online sales vs costs paid for the ads, helping you to categorize successful online ad campaigns through your e-commerce platform which in turn attracts offline/online customers.
   3. Cohort Analysis Report (customer behavioral analytics): A detailed report on customers’ behavioral analyses. This will help you to increase and predict customer preferences and choices.
   4. Customer Lifetime Value Report (LTV): Enabling you to establish customer-wise profit overtime. For your e-commerce business, this will help you forecast revenue throughout customer lifetime, showing you how much cost, you should incur for a particular group of customer preference.
   5. RFM Analysis Report (recency, frequency, monetary value): Enabling you to categorize profitable customers or group of customers making your e-commerce business successful. This will help you create your own base of loyal customers and set up personalized segments.
   6. Website’s Micro-Conversion Report: Enabling you to identify weakness in your e-commerce’s sales funnel. This can help you devise ways to encourage every customer landing on your e-commerce store to move items into the cart!
   7. Foreign Exchange Gain/Loss Report: A detailed exchange gain/loss report from international sales to evaluate how global sales affect revenue through exchange rates.
   8. Most Profitable Products: Product-wise sales report enabling you to understand your most profitable products.
   9. Products Comparison Reports: Weekly/monthly product-wise comparison reports for you to see monthly/weekly variations
   10. Product-wise Sales Report: Product-wise sales report VS available stock for you to manage things before stock-outs.
   11. Shipping Cost: Weekly/monthly product-wise shipping cost reports
   12. Insurance Costs Analysis:Weekly/monthly product-wise inventory insurance cost reports
   13. Product-wise Profit Analysis: Monthly batch-wise (product-wise) profitability report to clearly see profit per product,
   14. Gifts/Discounts: Gifts and product-wise discounts report
   15. Agents Commission Report: Agent wise commission report
   16. Internal Controls: Monthly review report on the efficiency of implemented internal controls and areas that require improvements.
   17. Area-wise Revenue Analysis: Area wise sales analysis so that you can focus and target on the most income-generating locations.
   18. Competitors Analysis: Product-wise comparison with competitors’ to allow you to assess market competition
   19. Analytical Sales Analysis: Sales comparison reports i.e Current Year Weekly Sales VS Last Year Weekly Sales (same period) e.g Jan 2019 Week 1 VS Jan 2020 Week 1 etc.
   20. Period-wise Profit & Loss Report: Year-wise P/L comparison reports (Jan-Dec 2019 vs Jan-Dec 2020) helping you to see your e-commerce business progress for effective strategy and policymaking.
8. Business Analysis and Business Valuation:
   Push Digits will assist you in the overall business valuation and business analysis of your e-commerce store through:
   • Payroll management
   • Cash flows management
   • Business analysis through detailed reports (review our reporting section)
   • Accurate Revenue computation and recognition
   • Accounting software support and management
   • Business bank and trial balance reconciliations
   • Balance sheet & income statement preparation
   • Debt planning
   • Accounts payable (Creditors) management
   • Accounts receivable (Debtors) management
   • Credit card management
   • Stock inventory statements preparation
   • Detailed performance reviews
   • Financial accounting and reporting requirements management
   • Tax returns computation and filing
   • Monthly/Yearly budget preparation
   • Budget-to-actual reporting
   • Budget monitoring

AND MANY MORE. Push Digits Chartered Accountants is one of the top accounting firms in UAE that provides customized bookkeeping and accounting services for the e-commerce industry.

Why Push Digits Chartered Accountants?

It’s always better to give your work to someone who has a lot of experience. Right? Same goes for handing over your books. The complexity of your E-commerce business requires that you choose someone who is not only skilled at bookkeeping but also has experience with the E-commerce industry.

Push Digits Chartered Accountants is the only accountancy firm in UAE, along with Big 4, that provides  specialized accounting services for e-commerce industry.

Top 10 Strategic Reasons to Appoint Push Digits:

1. More than 10 years of experience in trading sector accounting.
2. More than 20 years of experience in auditing of e-commerce companies.
3. More than 20 years of experience in international taxation.
4. A decade of experience of every accounting and ERP system that has been invented till now.
5. Close collaboration with clients, ensuring the financials are always in a sellable position for potential buyers/investors.
6. Certified Public Accountants, Chartered Accountants, Qualified Chartered Certified Accountants, and experienced fraud examiners in the team.
7. Integrated financial services in collaboration with regional offices around the globe.
8. Close supervision by Big 4 trained Audit and Accounting Managers.
9. External and in-house training ensuring continuous professional and ethical development of staff.
10. Dynamic and internationally recognized Accounting and Audit Partners providing fantastic customer support.

Top 10 Operational Reasons to Appoint Push Digits Chartered Accountants:

Whether big or small, online store bookkeeping will always come with challenges. PUSH DIGITS will help you tackle all those cloud-bookkeeping issues. Engaging with PUSH DIGITS to handle bookkeeping of your digital platform will warrant you with the following additional advantages:

1. Help in Choosing the Best Accounting Software: Our experts will guide you to choose the best accounting software for your e-commerce business through a detailed analysis, not only from a technological perspective but from an accounting point of view too.
2. Employees’ Training: We are one of the very few accounting companies in UAE that also train your staff along with providing accounting services.
3. E-commerce Cash-flow Forecasts: With complete transactions recording, we will create projections to produce an accurate picture of your cash in-flows & out-flows, so you can take future business decisions confidently. Good-Bye to all the uncertainties and risks because with precise cash flow figures you can easily maintain profit margins and strategize to reverse the overspending trends.
4. Assistance in Getting Business Finances: Every financial institution requires up to date books of accounts and audited financial statements. We not only perform accounting but also conduct auditing of the accounts to ensure you secure the required financing Our audit reports can be used for:
   • Customers
   • Investors,
   • Regulators,
   • Lenders,
   • Suppliers,
5. Multi-Currency Transaction Support: Our bookkeepers will handle your global transactions in numerous currencies and work to eliminate discrepancies so you can expand your business throughout the five continents without fear of default.
6. Legal Requirement: The UAE law requires every business whether physical or online, to have well-organized records of financial data that are distinct from the personal expenses. Non-compliance can lead to huge penalties and even cancellation of your business license. Now you wouldn’t want that, right? So hire PUSH DIGITS to help you keep your records in a flow and your business flowing.
7. 24/7 At Your Service: Like your digital virtual store, we will also be at your service round the clock! Our workforce will not only assist you but will be available for any query 24 hours a day, 7 days a week & 365 days a year.
8. Business Analysis: To be able to analyze profit & loss, your business needs a detailed analysis of:
   • Cash inflows
   • Cash outflows
   • Revenue stream
     Our accountants have readymade and well customized templates which we use to perform any kind of indebt analysis like cash movement reports, expense overrun reports, inventory position report etc.
9. Tax Computation: We have a well-experienced tax department. Our VAT Consultants in Dubai work shoulder to shoulder with our clients to ensure all available tax benefits are availed before vat filings. We will make sure that you file accurate tax liability so as to avoid any future penalties or litigations.
10. Artificial Intelligence: We have automated countless processes of our clients by using AI. Our expertise in AI and robotic process implementation is unmatched in the MENA region.

How does Push Digits Work?

We offer service execution through a variety of ways to allow you to choose what suits best to your business:

1. A) Virtual Assistance: Our accountants will work at our Firm’s own office. Data collection is managed through either internet means or courier, with high confidentiality protocols. The accountant will also visit you physically for any internal/external meetings where accounts need to be presented.
2. B) On-Site Services: As per your requirement, our accountants will work at your office premises and complete the work under your management’s supervision with frequent reviews by our Quality Control Partner allocated for the assignment.
3. C) Combination: A combination of both of the above services.

What Do We Charge?

We provide services at highly affordable rates. Our vision is to help organizations see how outsourcing can help not only increase efficiency but also SAVE COSTS.

The payment method can either be:

• Pay-as-go,
• Pay Hourly,
• Pay daily,
• Pay weekly,
• Pay monthly,
• Or/and pay one-off

Our Final Note:

E-commerce business is the ultimate future of the world. The digital economy will soon take over. But unless you have proper bookkeeping, accurate financial information, up-to-date business records and streamlined transactions recording system, your e-commerce business will fall apart.

Accounting is the only language we speak

Top 10 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):