Small Canadian seller here (portable hygiene product, nothing fancy). Day job is in construction, so bookkeeping has always been the thing I do at 11pm on a Sunday with a coffee and a lot of regret.
The problem was never “enter the sales.” It was reconciling. Shopify pays out in lumps that don’t match any day’s sales, Square takes its fee before it hits the bank, Etsy collects HST for me on some orders and not others, and refunds show up in a different month than the sale. By tax time I had three spreadsheets that disagreed with each other and a bank statement that agreed with none of them.
A few months ago I spent some time wiring up the APIs for all three (had to build a little private Shopify app for that part) and got my bot at it to pull everything into one Google Sheet: every order, every fee, every refund, tax collected by province, and the payouts matched against the bank. Then it builds a basic P&L / balance sheet tab and an HST summary I can hand straight to my accountant.
Took about 15 hours a month off my plate and my accountant said it was the cleanest year-end package I’ve sent him, which, low bar, but still.
A couple of people in my maker-market circle asked if I’d run theirs. I’m thinking about it, mostly because I want to see if it holds up on a store that isn’t mine.
So two questions for people here:
- What’s the thing in your books that you know is wrong but haven’t had the energy to fix?
- If someone offered to reconcile one quarter for you for basically nothing, read-only API access, numbers stay in your own Drive — would you actually let them, or does that feel too sketchy no matter what?
Not selling anything in this post, I’m trying to figure out if this is a me problem or an everyone problem. Happy to answer questions about the setup.