When reconciling e-commerce transactions, there are two common approaches:
- Based on the payout date (when money hits your bank)
- Based on the sales date (when the sale actually occurred)
Some accounting tools take the shortcut of reconciling by payout date. But for e-commerce and retail businesses, this can distort your financials, misalign revenue and expenses, and create chaos at month-end.
Here’s why sales-date-based reconciliation is the only method that ensures accurate, reliable books—and how Bookkeep does it automatically.
Why Payout-Date Reconciliation Is a Problem
Most platforms (like Amazon or Shopify) bundle multiple days of sales into one payout. If you book all those sales on the payout date, you’re:
❌ Misstating revenue in the wrong period
❌ Delaying cost of goods sold (COGS), making margins look better or worse than they are
❌ Skewing sales trends, making reporting unreliable
❌ Making month-end close harder, especially when reconciling across different sales channels
In short: reconciling by payout date breaks accrual accounting standards and can lead to serious downstream issues with forecasting, taxes, and even fundraising.
Why Sales-Date Reconciliation Is Best Practice
Recording sales and related costs on the day the sale happens gives you:
✅ Accurate daily revenue
✅ Properly matched expenses (like COGS, shipping, and fees)
✅ Reliable margin analysis
✅ Clean month-end reporting
✅ True financial visibility to make smart decisions
Sales-date-based reconciliation aligns your accounting with actual business activity.
How Bookkeep Gets This Right — Automatically
At Bookkeep, we record sales, fees, taxes, and refunds daily—based on the date the transactions occurred, not when payouts are received. Our platform:
- Connects directly to Shopify, Amazon, Square, and others
- Pulls detailed transaction data daily
- Posts summarized journal entries by sales date into your accounting software
- Makes reconciliation fast, accurate, and painless
So instead of wrestling with lump-sum deposits and misaligned financials, your books are always clean, clear, and audit-ready.
Conclusion
If your accounting tool is reconciling based on payout date, it’s time for an upgrade. Sales-date-based reconciliation is not just cleaner—it’s essential for accurate e-commerce accounting.
