Where can I get a decent Bookkeeper/Consultant «
on: Apr 8, 2010, 8:10am »
Hi Everyone
We have been running a business on ebay. Sometimes we ship direct ourselves and sometimes we use the suppliers to send direct to the customers from stock we own on their premises.
This works quite well but the bookkeeping is a nightmare with a separate supplier invoice (between 8 to 50 per day) for each item sold.
The majority of bookkeeping consultants are "willing to give it a go" which means they will learn a new trick on our time. This usually involves them using either Sage 50 or Quickbooks and trying to shoehorn a dropshipping business into one the standard business models that come with these packages. The last two bookkeeping consultants had very little idea of how a dropshipping business works. Add to that the workings of Ebay and PayPal...Well, we have taught them more than they taught us
What I would like to have is a bookkeeper/consultants with demonstrable skills who has experience of this kind of business, and eBay, PayPal and Websites. It has to be done on a daily basis or it gets completely out of hand.
For what it's worth IMHO the bookkeeper can make or break this kind of business and I cannot be the first one who has come up against this problem.
Re: Where can I get a decent Bookkeeper/Consultant « Reply #2
on: Apr 27, 2010, 2:19pm »
It sounds like the biggest problem is data entry. In my opinion, you have several options.
1. Hire somebody to do daily bookeeping and data entry employee. Adding employees comes with its own costs in the US and I assume they are the same or worse in the UK.
2. Hire an external service for data entry. There are people that do this as temps or 1099 employees in the US that is less expensive. You would need to provide some type of access to your accounting system.l
3. Ask your wholesalers to provide a data feed for your invoices. They may be able to batch them into 1 feed every day. This will allow for better automation.
These are probably your best bets. We do not do much drop ship so our total invoices are only about 50 per month and our sales invoices are loaded using automation so it isn't as much of a beast for us. We did find that eBay's accounting assistant is horrible. We ended up using macros to import our sales information from eBay, Amazon, website, etc., into quick books.
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