Why Your Online Business Needs Accounting Integration

Why Your Online Business Needs Accounting Integration

The world of eCommerce is growing every day, and every business wants a piece of the pie—with Statista offering a forecast that worldwide eCommerce sales will reach $1.92 trillion in 2015, it’s no surprise. However, while getting online is easy, keeping track can be difficult for a host of reasons.

Spending Too Much Money on Money

One of the costliest aspects of operating any small business is actually the process of handling money. Financial officers, bookkeepers and accountants cost almost 30 percent of small businesses over $10 thousand per year according to Accounting Today. That’s not even the full story.

Annual bookkeeping fees among small businesses:

• 23 percent spend up to $1 thousand
• 31 percent spend up to $5 thousand
• 18 percent spend up to $10 thousand
• 12 percent spend up to $20 thousand
• 16 percent spend over $20 thousand

With figures like these, the idea of handling a business online can be daunting. Balancing the books in a brick and mortar location can be next to impossible for small businesses, not to mention financial reporting and inventory management. However, if it’s a choice between $20 thousand per year spent on professional bookkeeping services or more than ten hours every month doing it oneself with no guarantee of success, it’s hard to decide which is the lesser of two failures.

The Third Option

There is a third option, allowing small business owners to save the money spent on financial advice and assistance while still avoiding the ten-hour monthly drag, and it applies specifically to online businesses. Reports from Entrepreneur.com and Startups magazine show that over 150 thousand businesses currently utilize Shopify, with thousands more utilizing BigCommerce for their online storefront needs.  Many of these businesses also utilize the internet for their accounting, turning to QuickBooks Online and Xero for all their bookkeeping needs. However, these services can’t communicate with one another, meaning that each invoice and product must be input manually into both the eCommerce platform and the chosen bookkeeping program. This can take hours out of a single day, never mind a fiscal year.

Pipemonk, with its eCommerce accounting integration, is currently picking up speed while offering business owners everywhere an easy way to get their online storefront and their accounting software to communicate with one another in a language both platforms understand. Initial setup can take a little time, but as long as both sides—the storefront and the books—are set up correctly, everything can become automated with a few clicks of a mouse.

How It Works

Getting Pipemonk to work is a simple process:

1. An online business starts setup of Shopify or BigCommerce, including products and inventory, taxes, shipping and so on. This is all done when a new storefront is built on Shopify anyway, so it’s no more work than the business owner would have to do in the first place.
2. Next the business moves on to the Xero or QuickBooks setup process, specifically all the necessary accounts. This includes payable and receivable, payroll, invoicing and any others. Normally this would also include manually transferring products and inventory from the eCommerce storefront to the accounting platform, but with Pipemonk this is unnecessary.
3. Now the business sets up a new Pipemonk account using some basic information easily obtained from both their eCommerce platform and their online account software. This step includes enabling ZapStitch on both platforms as needed, which in most cases takes less than ten minutes.

Once these three simple steps are completed, it’s just a matter of allowing the services to sync through Pipemonk. The first sync will take a little while due to the fact that the integration is being fully established on both ends. This means that every product and purchase is being transferred automatically from Shopify or BigCommerce to QuickBooks or Xero—or even from Market to Zoho with a new feature—where everything from invoices to inventory are automatically generated. Invoices are automatically filed for every purchase made through the online store and automatically updated when the status of an order changes.

Because everything is filed automatically, this not only makes tracking profit and loss easier, but also allows for reporting to be simpler, more efficient and more accurate with each successive synchronization.

Bridging the Gap

Integration between eCommerce and accounting platforms for small to mid-size businesses is integral to keeping everything running smoothly. Any business that operates online needs to function like a well-oiled machine. Pipemonk makes this possible, automating accounting processes that could normally take hours out of every day. This in turn allows to focus on the so-called “important things,” such as maintaining standards of customer service, bringing in new clients and expanding reach on a global—not to mention constantly growing—scale.