eBay and online sellers were left in the lurch last year when GoDaddy abruptly ended its low-cost bookkeeping solution. But the original founder of the solution is developing a new offering to fill the void called Seller Ledger, currently in beta.
Not only will the new offering help with bookkeeping and taxes, Seller Ledger is planning new features that will give sellers a better understanding of their profitability, such as a report that will show whether their business is making money on shipping or not.
Kevin Reeth cofounded Outright in 2008, which integrated with online marketplaces and financial services to make it easier for small sellers to collect revenue and expense data. Outright sold the solution to GoDaddy in 2012, and it remained an affordable option for marketplace sellers until June 18, 2022.
Reeth said he hadn’t found out about GoDaddy’s plans to discontinue the bookkeeping solution until many months after the fact, “so we’re rushing to try to fill the void. We’ve been live in Beta for just over a month and are aiming to help people who were left in the lurch last year.”
The plan isn’t simply to replace the original offering, but to add more features. “One thing we’ve added that GoDaddy Bookkeeping never had is a simple report about whether you’re making money on shipping or not,” Reeth told us. “We also plan to do a lot more around cost of goods and per-order profitability.”
Currently Seller Ledger integrates with eBay, and Reeth said they plan to add Etsy next – and would love to find some sellers willing to test with the company. “There are a number of posts on their seller community with very similar frustration” regarding the demise of GoDaddy Bookeeping, and Seller Ledger just applied for Etsy’s developer program.
Here are the features Seller Ledger currently offers for sellers:
1) The ability to link your eBay account and pull in all of your data. We actually get order-level details, which allows us to split out shipping collected and final value fees to match against 1099-K amounts. This is something QuickBooks (which GoDaddy recommended) gets wrong, because they only import the net payout amounts.
2) The ability to link PayPal as well as most bank and credit card accounts.
3) We let you categorize transactions and have the software apply that categorization to all past and future matching transactions
4) You can also manually enter cash expenses and track mileage.
5) We show you a running profit and loss report while also pre-populating a schedule C tax form.
One thing Seller Ledger will not add are features that don’t apply to online merchants, such as invoicing and time tracking, which GoDaddy had offered. “We’ve left those features out,” Reeth said.
In terms of pricing, Seller Ledger is free during beta testing but will charge based on transaction volume, starting at $10/month.
Right now, any US-based eBay seller can sign up, including those with multiple eBay accounts – however, it doesn’t yet support eBay international, and it has more features to add, including custom categories.
This time, Reeth said, Seller Ledger is self-funding the company. “We don’t want the growth pressure (and other side effects) that comes from raising outside money,” he said.
For those who sign up as a beta tester by March 31st, Seller Ledger will pull all of their 2022 data, getting around the typical 90-day limitation.
“I can’t give a definitive date on when we’ll start charging,” Reeth said, “but we’re targeting the next month or so. We’ll still give everyone 30-days to decide if they want to pay, once we turn on billing.”
See details and pricing on the Seller Ledger website.
If they can do that with bookkeeping software, then we should have 3 new selling venues by the end of the year.
I signed up. Not sure what the point of “Beta” is if there is no where on the site for help or to leave comments/suggestions.
My issues so far:
When I connected my bank account, I had to connect *all* the accounts I had with that bank — there was no option to just connect my business-related account. And I don’t see an option on the Seller Ledger site to filter out the non-business accounts or those extraneous transactions.
I connected several eBay accounts, and I don’t see a way to filter those either. If you just want to see income from one of your accounts, not all, there’s no way to do it currently.
So, for me, this product is not ready for prime time. Hopefully they’ll address these issues eventually, but until they do, this can’t be my solution.
I found a help email on the site and have received a prompt response to some of my issues, so I am encouraged by that. Will update as I learn more.
If I could edit (or even delete) my first response, I would. 🙂
This is like Christmas came early. Still needs some tweeking but surely in the right direction.
Thank you Ina for alerting us to this gift.