The deposit is not the sale
Amazon settles roughly every two weeks; Shopify Payments and Stripe pay out on a rolling schedule. Every one of those deposits is a bundle: gross sales, minus referral and processing fees, minus refunds, sometimes minus FBA fulfillment, storage and advertising charges, sometimes with a slice held back in reserve. Coding the deposit straight to sales makes revenue and expenses both wrong by the same large number.
The tax error is worse than the cosmetic one. HST is collected on the gross sale, not on what the platform chose to deposit, so net-deposit books quietly under-report the tax you owe. And where platform fees carry GST/HST of their own, the input tax credits are only recoverable if the fees are visible as expenses instead of vanishing inside a lump. Getting this right every month is the core of End-to-End Accounting: bookkeeping, payroll, financial reporting and tax filing under one roof.
A2X turns settlements into journal entries
We do not retype settlement reports. A2X connects Amazon, Shopify and the other major channels to QuickBooks Online or Xero, splits each payout into sales, refunds, fee types, tax collected and reserve movements, and posts one clean entry per settlement. The bank feed then matches to the penny, month after month, across every channel you sell on.
Around that spine we run supplier bills and freight invoices through Dext, keep sales-channel and product-line reporting separate, and close on a fixed monthly rhythm. Multi-channel sellers get one P&L that shows Amazon, Shopify and wholesale side by side instead of three exports that never agree.
Where each settlement line belongs
| Line on the settlement | Where it goes in the books |
|---|---|
| Gross sales collected from customers | Revenue, at full value, by channel |
| GST/HST collected at checkout | A liability owed to the CRA, never revenue |
| Referral and payment-processing fees | Selling costs, with their own recoverable tax captured |
| FBA fulfillment and storage charges | Fulfillment expense, tracked per channel |
| Refunds and returns | A revenue reversal plus an HST adjustment |
| Chargebacks and dispute fees | Reversed sale plus a real fee expense worth watching |
| Advertising deducted from the payout | Ad spend on its own line, not netted into sales |
| Rolling reserve or account-level hold | Your money, held: an asset, not an expense |
Returns, chargebacks and reserves get their own lines
Returns are a normal cost of selling online, but only if the books show them. A refund reverses the sale and the HST on it; the original processing fee is often kept by the processor, which makes the true cost of a return higher than the refund itself. We track the return rate by channel so a product whose returns eat its margin gets noticed before reorder time.
Chargebacks are nastier: the sale reverses, a dispute fee lands on top, and the inventory rarely comes back. Reserves and payout holds, meanwhile, are not losses at all. They are receivables, and books that expense them overstate costs in the month of the hold and invent income when it releases.
Inventory is an asset until the order ships
Money spent on stock is not an expense on the day you pay the supplier. It sits on the balance sheet as inventory at landed cost: the supplier invoice plus ocean or air freight, customs duty and brokerage. The 5% GST paid at the border is not part of landed cost for a registrant, because it comes back as an input tax credit on the next return. Cost of goods sold is recognized as units sell, so gross margin is real, not a guess.
We keep a per-SKU landed cost that updates as freight rates move, tie the inventory balance to a periodic count, and flag stock that has stopped selling so the write-down conversation happens on purpose. Clean inventory numbers are also what make margin questions answerable later without a forensic rebuild.
Statements a seller can act on
Month-end for the sellers we work with across Mississauga and the GTA closes on schedule: revenue by channel at gross, fees as a percentage of sales, return rate, gross margin after landed cost, and the HST liability building for the next filing. A side-hustle store that does not need full monthly service yet can keep a CPA on call with CPA Quick Support at $99 a month. Everything larger is scoped and quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call.
