You closed 400 orders across Shopify and Amazon last month, three suppliers got paid, a chargeback came through, and payroll ran for two part-timers. Every one of those events is a bookkeeping entry, and if it does not land in the books correctly, your numbers stop telling you the truth.
That is what bookkeeping duties actually are: the recurring work that turns a pile of transactions into financial statements you can trust. Miss a few and the damage is quiet at first, then obvious at tax time or when a lender asks for clean books.
Below is the full list of what the job covers, grouped so you can see how the pieces fit. You can handle these yourself, split them with software, or hand them off. Either way, the scope stays the same.
A bookkeeper records and reconciles every transaction, manages money owed and money due, runs payroll, tracks inventory and asset values, keeps the general ledger and chart of accounts accurate, produces and reviews financial reports, and keeps records tax-ready. For an ecommerce business it also means handling marketplace payouts and inventory correctly, which is where cash-basis books usually go wrong.
Not sure where to start
Rather hand the whole list off?
Book a free discovery call and we’ll walk through what your books actually need.
The foundation of the job is getting every dollar into the books and proving it matches reality.
Reconciliation means comparing your recorded income and expenses against the bank statement and confirming they match. The process catches everyday errors: a transaction entered twice, one never recorded, or a bank fee nobody booked. On an ecommerce account with hundreds of small charges, a monthly reconciliation is the difference between books you can trust and a rough guess.
Every dollar coming in gets recorded to a revenue account and traced to its source. Sellers get burned here more than most guides admit, because marketplaces pay you net. Amazon and Shopify deposit sales minus fees, refunds, and reserves, so the deposit is never your true revenue.
Recording that payout as one lump sum understates both your sales and your costs at the same time, which hides problems on both sides.
Same logic as the bank, applied to every business card. You compare each card statement against the transactions in your general ledger and resolve anything that does not line up. Cards are where subscriptions, ad spend, and small tools hide, so skipping this is how a $90 monthly charge runs for a year before anyone notices.
The general ledger is the master record that holds every account and every entry behind your financial statements. Bookkeeping runs on double-entry, so each transaction hits two accounts, and the ledger has to stay balanced with total debits equal to total credits. Keeping it current and balanced is what makes every report downstream accurate.
Two of these duties track what you owe and what you are owed, and two cover paying people.
Accounts payable is everything your business owes to suppliers and vendors. The duty is tracking every bill and its due date, including payment terms like Net 30 or Net 15, so nothing is paid late and nothing is paid twice. For inventory sellers this is most of the outgoing money, so clean payable tracking doubles as a cash-flow tool rather than mere filing.
Accounts receivable is the reverse: money customers owe you for goods or services already delivered. You record the invoice as an asset, then monitor it until it is collected. Most ecommerce sales settle instantly, but wholesale, B2B, and Net-30 customers do not, and unwatched receivables are cash you earned but never chased.
Payroll is more than multiplying hours by a rate. You calculate gross and net wages, then withhold, deposit, and report payroll taxes on the IRS schedule, and employers carry the responsibility for getting it right. The paperwork behind it is spelled out in the IRS Employer’s Tax Guide.
You can run payroll manually, through an accountant, or through payroll software, depending on how much of it you want to own.
When a team member pays for something out of pocket, that reimbursement has to be recorded, and some reimbursements carry their own tax treatment. The rule that keeps this clean is simple: anyone spending on the business reports it to whoever owns the books, so the transaction gets categorized when it happens instead of reconstructed months later.
Pricing calculator
See what monthly bookkeeping would cost you
Enter your channels and volume for a real number. No email required to see it.
These four duties keep the structure of the books sound as the business grows.
The chart of accounts, or COA, is the index of every account type you use: assets, liabilities, equity, revenue, and expenses. Reviewing it keeps categories consistent and useful, so your reports group spending the way you actually think about the business. A well-built chart of accounts is what lets you see margin by channel instead of one blended number.
Depreciation spreads the cost of a tangible asset, like equipment or a warehouse fit-out, across the years it stays useful. Amortization does the same for intangibles like patents or trademarks. Both follow IRS recovery rules under Publication 946, and both are recorded so your asset values and profit reflect real wear over time instead of the purchase-day price forever.
If you hold stock, the books have to track what sold, what is left, and what it is worth. Ecommerce breaks cash-basis accounting right here: inventory you bought in one month often sells across the next three. EcomBalance books sales and cost of goods sold (COGS) on accrual and other expenses on cash for exactly this reason, so COGS lands in the month the product actually sold and each month shows its real margin.
Records only protect you if they survive a lost laptop or a ransomware week. Most accounting software backs up to the cloud automatically, which is the practical case for keeping the books in a tool rather than a spreadsheet on one machine. The IRS also expects records to be available: employment tax records must be kept at least four years, and the burden of proof for any deduction sits with you.
The final duties turn accurate books into decisions and keep you square with the tax authorities.
Producing the three core reports (the profit and loss statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement) is only half the duty. The other half is reading them for the metrics that signal what is working and what is slipping. A monthly profit and loss statement you never open is a file rather than a decision tool.
Cash-flow review tracks money moving in and out so you always know your working capital. Profit on paper and cash in the account are different numbers, and a growing, profitable store can still run short because inventory and payables tie up cash before the sales catch up. Watching the flow is how you see that coming.
Variance analysis puts your forecast next to your real results and shows the gap. When actuals come in worse than planned, the gap tells you where to adjust spending or reforecast. Done monthly, it turns the budget from a start-of-year guess into a live steering tool.
Margins tell you whether growth is actually making money. The duty is watching margin by product and channel over time, so you can see which SKUs earn their shelf space and where costs are quietly eating the return. Rising revenue with falling margin is a warning most owners miss until it is a problem.
Sales tax, income tax, and employment tax each have their own forms and deadlines, and missing one means penalties. The bookkeeping duty is keeping records complete and accurate through the year so filing becomes a compilation instead of a scramble. Sales tax in particular is a liability you collect and owe on behalf of the state, never your own revenue, and it is set at the state level, so confirm your obligations with your CPA or tax professional.
Every duty above is doable yourself, especially early. The question is whether it is the best use of your time.
DIY works when volume is low and you want first-hand feel for the numbers. The approach stops working when transactions climb, errors compound, and reconciliation starts eating a day you would rather spend on the business.
That is the point most owners hand it off, either to software that automates the mechanical duties or to a service that owns the whole list. Our take is plain: the books are critical and unglamorous, and doing them yourself past a certain size is rarely worth the hours.
+
Bookkeeping duties are the recurring recording, reconciling, and reporting work that keeps your financial data accurate. Accounting sits on top of that data to interpret it, plan taxes, and advise on decisions. Clean bookkeeping is what makes good accounting possible, since an accountant working from messy books is just guessing.
+
Yes, particularly when your transaction volume is low. Accounting software handles much of the mechanical work like bank feeds and reconciliation, and the accounting basics are learnable. The trade-off is time and error risk, both of which grow with the business, which is when most owners bring in help.
+
Reconciliation, correct revenue recording from net marketplace payouts, and inventory on an accrual basis. Those three are where cash-basis ecommerce books go wrong most often, and getting them right is what makes your margins believable. The rest matter, but these three protect the numbers you make decisions on.
+
Most run monthly, with reconciliation and payables often handled more frequently. What matters is a consistent cadence, since a monthly close gives you twelve comparable data points a year and catches errors while you still remember the transactions. For a cadence-based checklist, see our guide to bookkeeping tasks.
Taken together, these duties are the real scope of keeping a set of books: record and reconcile, manage money in and out, keep the structure accurate, and turn the result into reports and a clean tax filing. None of it is complicated on its own. The difficulty is doing all of it, every month, without letting anything slip.
That is the work we take off your plate. EcomBalance handles the full monthly close for ecommerce sellers, with sales and COGS on accrual so your margins are honest, and your profit and loss statement, balance sheet, and cash flow delivered by the 15th. If your books have drifted or the list above is eating your month, our team can pick it up.
Ready for clean books
Let our team own the whole list
Book a free discovery call and see what monthly bookkeeping off your plate looks like.
