Meeting your legal obligations, structuring your accounting, transmitting your data to your accounting firm, selling internationally, these are the challenges of e-commerce accounting.
Invoicing: an essential step
In e-commerce the rule is very simple: the invoice must be published at the time of shipment and not following the customer's payment.
In e-commerce, the contract is executed when the seller delivers the goods. It is therefore essential to meet this obligation, and to do so, guarantee your company compliance with all these legal rules by issuing your electronic invoice.
The different ways to generate the invoice: copying, data exchange, invoicing module...
The main e-commerce solutions are used to produce delivery notes and sales invoices. There are also connectors to accounting software. As a result, it requires the entry of sales invoices in the accounts or the substitution of commercial management invoicing for e-commerce. As soon as the activity develops, these re-entries become difficult to manage and are a source of errors.
When you manage several sales sites on the solution of the same publisher or even more so of different publishers, the situation becomes even more complex. How to guarantee a unique strain and invoice numbers in this case?
Structure of accounting entries
An invoice is issued in the name of a customer and contains products, taxes (VAT and parafiscal charges such as ecotax, etc.) and services. It also includes information related to the payment, its amount and the way it was made. These different elements must be associated with the correct accounting account numbers for the export to work. Very few e-commerce solutions allow you to associate these account numbers. If, in addition, you have a multi-shop activity, it makes the task even more complicated.
Transmit the data to the accounting department
As we have seen previously, few modules allow transferring data from an e-commerce to the accounts. However, it is mandatory to do so. In order to avoid re-entries and to have a "clean" management of newspapers, the intermediate step by a management solution such as Monday Morning Business is therefore essential as the solution.
Invoice, credit note and voucher
E-commerce solutions worthy of the name make it possible to manage article returns, order cancellations, credit note generation (customer refund) or purchase vouchers (value to be deducted from a future purchase). However, they are rarely able to manage special cases. Indeed, since the generation of the invoice occurs following the customer's payment and not after delivery, it is possible and probable that items in the backlog will still be invoiced.
Manage down payments at year-end
Special case: your customers place orders with you and pay for them between 29 and 31 December. You will only be able to deliver them at the beginning of January of the following year. Their payment therefore constitutes a down payment. Which e-commerce solution can manage this correctly?
Selling for export
Export sales impose rules, beyond the currency used. This is true for sales within the European Union, let alone outside (Switzerland for example). Different accounting accounts, different VAT regimes... all these particularities must be managed precisely.
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