Leveraging Automated eCommerce Accounting and Payment systems

As a seller, you have to think like a customer. 

Yes, you read that right.

Picture yourself going around your website or store, finding and adding items to your cart. You proceed to checkout, and select a payment option. There are several suspect failure points in a customer journey, but the inability to account for and reconcile cash inflows and outflows is at the top of the list of concerns. To ensure frictionless experiences, an eCommerce accounting and payment system is absolutely essential.  .  

On the Base system, this payment tracking and synchrony of stock to invoices is possible with scores of globally functional accounting integrations. We’ll look at its internal workings shortly, and give you tips on how to select eCommerce payment and accounting systems. 

Steps to Streamline Accounting functions on Base

The Base system is home to several integrations across marketplaces, wholesalers, courier partners and accounting and payment systems. It is designed to facilitate easy addition and linking of existing accounts on these individual platforms so that all these functions can run from a central panel rather than have several separate interactions. The platform not only lets you create invoices, receipts and sales registers but also sends sales documents to a plugged in accounting software.

To add an accounting integration-navigate to

• Integrations tab-> add new integration (a green button located on the bottom right hand side of the screen).
• The window opens up to display the integrations tiled and sorted by category- i.e. marketplaces, wholesalers, couriers and accounting.
• Under accounting, choose from 35+ integrations including preferred favorites such as QuickBooks, Tally and Xero.
• QuickBooks users can connect the panel by clicking on the green button, which directs them to the Intuit Login.

1. After logging in, you should click on the setting style to view all parameters. You can choose to import the invoice numbering either from the Base or QuickBooks panel before deciding to set up automatic actions to forward invoices. Your customer will receive it in an email which again needs to be templated through automatic actions.
2. You can choose to pass either the net or gross price and send product codes to QuickBooks.
3. If you decide to pass SKUs through an accounting system like Quickbooks, it will recognize the product and confirm identity through a dropdown box of the parameters or attributes for that particular SKU. When correctly integrated, a match is displayed.
4. To support invoice and label generation, the export tab pushes invoices from Base to QuickBooks that are created in the system. 
5. In the series numbering tab, users can explore further settings.
6. In the payments tab, users can connect multi-payment options and sync these with the options provided by QuickBooks.
7. Indian sellers can use TallyPrime to consolidate orders based on entries such as 

• Place of Ship, Place of Supply
• B2C data.
• Ledgers, Vouchers and Products as per Tally Product Names.

The integration connects several Tally instances that represent different divisions of the same company within a single account. All the seller will need to do is enter the GSTIN number of the accounts in the numbering series to assign unique numbering to several Tally accounts. The seller can reconcile payments and have them flow in correctly.  

1. Under the Orders tab, there is an option for sellers to enable invoice forwarding through Automatic Actions.

Think of the dropshipping model, where the inventory isn’t onsite. Orders can have multiple price groups.Through the Baselinker Connect which facilitates connection opportunities for wholesalers, manufacturers etc,the original seller sees the the order price for a product that comes in. On the system, the dropshipper can see a price group for himself when the order is fetched into Base, and the seller sees a separate price group. In this case, the system creates a quote and sends the order ID to the script hosted on the seller’s website. An API calls this script to help the seller set the price according to the dropshipper’s inventory.  For the dropshipper, once all orders are imported,a Stripe payment link is generated to collect the payment from the seller prior to shipping. 

Tips to Pick the Right eCommerce Accounting Software

Here are a few factors to consider when picking an eCommerce accounting system

1. Know your audience

With different payment options designed for convenience, it’s a good idea to know what your target audience expects and prefers, which extends to payments. Age, spending power and lifestyle all play into this. For example, Baby Boomers may prefer Cash-on-Delivery or Netbanking over UPI as they ensure they can hand over the money to the right person and avoid falling into a scam trap. Through market research conducted via polls, feedback engines and surveys, this data is helpful in analyzing the most and least-preferred payment modes. 

2. Geographical reach

Look at the countries where a particular eCommerce accounting integration works, and the technical feasibility of calling it through a token or API. In this regard,Base supports several cross border and domestic accounting integrations that synchronize stock levels to invoices and apply inventory adjustments against stock debits, returns credit (items that are resellable condition) etc.

3. Revisit eCommerce Subscriptions

Reexamine products or services that have subscriptions and sort them according to product category (for eg. entertainment), recurrences, whether paused, active or canceled. Compare this against one-off orders to avoid double charges and extra deductions that you’ll need to correct later.  

4. Fees

You should look at the platform fees for different payment systems including currency conversion, reconciliation setup and determine if the value-benefit is worth the price you’ll be paying for. With Base, you can try out core accounting integrations over a 30-day free trial period and play around with the system.