Amazon and PayPal: A NOT Love Story
For most of my small business clients the easiest way to keep their books has been to use QuickBooks Online, or for me to hold their books on QuickBooks Desktop. This allows me to download transactions and reconcile bank statements quickly and easily, any time, without bugging the client for bank statements or receipts.
But doing it this way requires that I know what various expenditures are for. Most of the time this is pretty easy: Staples is office supplies, AEP is utilities. But some of the charges that come through make me crazy. Number One and Two Offenders? Amazon and PayPal.
An expenditure from Amazon could be for ANYTHING. Same for PayPal. And it is impossible for me to determine what you bought, or if it is a business or personal expense.
So what can we do to make my life a little easier, and make your books better? We have a couple choices. If you can promise me you only ever use Amazon to buy Snarfwagglers then I will just code the Amazon purchases to that account. But if you can’t make that promise I will likely segregate your purchases to an “Amazon” expense account, or maybe even take them off the income statement entirely and put them in the “Suspense” account. You will need to keep your own records of your Amazon purchases and we will review them and move them to the correct accounts periodically.
The final option, if you have QBO, is for you to go in and enter those expense yourself. I would be happy to do a quick Zoom lesson and teach you how to do that!