Year-end and exports

Getting the year's numbers out in a form your accountant can use.

What to do before you export

Half an hour of tidying makes the difference between an export your accountant can work from and one they send back with questions.

• Every sale synced. Run a sync on each connected marketplace, and check that no marketplace stops abruptly partway through the year — that usually means a connection expired and nobody noticed.
• Cost of goods recorded on items that sold. Missing cost basis overstates profit, which means overstated tax.
• Expenses entered, including recurring ones and December's.
• Mileage complete. Look for gaps. A month with no trips in a year of weekly sourcing is a month somebody forgot to log.
• Sales from elsewhere marked, including cash sales.

Exporting

Export from Bookkeeping. You get:

• Income by source
• Fees
• Cost of goods
• Expenses by category
• Mileage totals
• Hours

As CSV, which opens in any spreadsheet and imports into most accounting software.

The shape it comes out in

Organised along the lines a small-business tax return asks for — income, cost of goods sold, expenses by category. In the US that is roughly Schedule C shaped; other jurisdictions differ in detail but ask the same questions in a different order.

Your accountant will know what to do with it. It is not a filled-in tax return and it is not trying to be.

Sanity checks

Before you send it, check that:

• Total income roughly matches what hit your bank across the year. Large gaps mean unsynced sales or a marketplace that stopped syncing.
• Fees look proportionate. Roughly 10–20% of sales depending on marketplace mix. Far below that suggests missing fee data.
• Expenses are not suspiciously round. Round-number totals usually mean estimated entries rather than recorded ones.
• No category is empty that should not be. No supplies for a year of shipping means unlogged expenses, which is money left on the table.

Marketplace tax forms

Marketplaces issue their own tax documents — 1099-K in the US, equivalents elsewhere — based on their own reporting thresholds.

Those come from the marketplace, not from Reskale. Your export should broadly reconcile with them; where it does not, the usual cause is that marketplace forms report gross while your net is after fees.

Give your accountant both.

Keeping records

Retain records for as long as your jurisdiction requires — commonly several years.

Export at year end and keep the file somewhere durable of your own. A local copy of your own books is worth having independently of any tool, including this one.

Not tax advice

Reskale organises your numbers. It does not know your jurisdiction, your business structure, or which deductions apply to you.

The export is what a tax professional wants to receive: complete, categorised, and derived from records rather than reconstruction. What happens to it after that is their job.

Related

• Bookkeeping overview
• Income and expenses
• Mileage and hours