Get Your Ebay Receipt Generator for Accounting and Tax Effortlessly

How to get a receipt from ebay

hey what's going on everybody steve here rake and profit over at rakenprofit.com and in this video i'm going to be sharing with you the first 10 steps that you need to know in order to set up legitimate bookkeeping for your ebay amazon poshmark business in order to be prepared for tax season right when it comes to running an ebay and amazon business a lot of people who start off you know they're not keeping track of their books and they're not even claiming any income towards taxes because they're not receiving a 1099 and i'm not here to tell you what you should do everybody has to make their own decisions based on what they think is right or wrong in terms of the law and in terms of being on the right side of the law any income that you earn you're supposed to claim it [Music] i want to talk about bookkeeping for a couple of reasons because i just got off a call with one of my buddies joe who i've been coaching helping him with the stuff i'm going to talk about today and one of the things that he talked about which we were both going back and forth with is when you don't have your books in line when you know that tax season's coming and you're gonna owe a bunch of money you're unorganized you feel like you know what i'm just doing things wrong like this isn't right it holds you back right you might have all the motivation in a world and you might have all the ability to scale a business and build a five six seven figure ebay amazon business but if you know in the back your head if you're like me that you're doing something wrong that you know what i'm just worrying all the time about state taxes federal taxes if i'm going to get in trouble if you're worried about am i going to overpay on taxes because my books are wrong or am i going to underpay and they're going to come after me a lot of this just holds us back so why am i talking about this i mentioned a couple of those reasons it helps you to sleep at night one of the things that i used to hate and i did this for years until i finally figured this stuff out you know three four years ago i used to hate when tax season was coming and for the next month i was worrying i was pissed off i was angry i was chasing down receipts i was trying to categorize all my expenses i was going through credit cards and i was going through statements and it was a nightmare right who here can relate to that drop a comment down below smash that like button if you never want to deal with that again and that's what this video is all about i'm going to literally teach you the 10 steps to be able to never have to worry about the stuff again okay so if you don't know who i am my name's steve i've been selling on ebay and amazon for over seven years i quit my job delivering pizzas working at the cracker barrels since then i've been able to earn a six-figure income for years now reselling making money online e-commerce affiliate marketing i just recently started my own brand my own e-commerce store so what i'm going to share with you is from first-hand experience everything that i'm going to teach you today i've done i've taught my mom how to do it she's 67 she retired by selling books on amazon so let's get right into this right now so step number one the best thing that you're going to want to do is set up a a system right and i recommend a couple of softwares first and foremost for most people you're going to want to check out godaddy bookkeeping so i'm going to put a link to that down below they have three different plans one's 4.99 a month one's 9.99 and one's 14.99 a month i'd recommend the 9.99 a month plan and essentially what this software is going to do is it's going to organize everything that has to do with your bookkeeping so bookkeeping's going to come down to a couple of things to generalize it's mostly organizing your income so the money you're making on ebay and amazon and then organizing all of your expenses right expenses could come in the form of your cost of goods your inventory your lease your ebay fees your paypal fees it could be office supplies it could be education we're going to be talking more about this so when you get to the end of the year and hopefully you hire an accountant or a tax professional they're going to want to know how much money did you make and they're going to want that organized and broken down and then they're going to want to know what were your expenses because the goal at the end of the year is to get down to your profit which you're going to pay taxes on and again before i get too too deep into this i want to say i'm not a lawyer i'm not a tax professional this is just for entertainment purposes only i'm only sharing what i'm doing i can't legally give you advice but i can only share from my experiences so i would recommend checking out godaddy bookkeeping i've actually moved on from that now and i use quickbooks but either one is good but i definitely recommend godaddy bookkeeping that's what i got my mom set up on and that's going to organize everything it's going to organize your income it's going to organize your expenses you're going to be able to categorize everything i'm going to talk more about it and what what's really cool about this software is you can link up your paypal any payment processors you can link up your amazon account your ebay account your paypal you can link up bank accounts credit cards so when you spend money on expenses it'll automatically pull it in when you make money on ebay amazon it'll automatically pull in i'm going to talk more about that but one of the issues of just saving your receipts and using a document or a pen and a pad or a notebook is it's just really hard to keep things organized so for a nominal fee of 9.99 a month literally you can have everything organized it just takes a little bit of time to set it up at first but once you do that i'm telling you it's a huge time saver okay so step one sign up for godaddy bookkeeping or if you're more advanced quickbooks step two and this is optional setting up a business entity so everything i talk about today you can do it as just a personal seller sole proprietor you don't have to have an llc for myself i started off selling as a sole proprietor i moved on to an llc and then as i started making over six figures profit i ended up uh becoming an s corporation okay so this is optional to set up a business entity you don't need to set up an llc you don't need to set up a business if you do it'll just give you a little more protection against liabilities and some of the steps i'm going to share with you are going to require you to set up a bank account so if you have a business you're obviously going to want to set up a business bank account put in your ein number if you don't then you can just do it as a a personal uh bank account credit cards all that stuff so that's optional step number two setting up a business such as an llc or an s corporation if you're making enough money but i just want to put that out there step number three when it comes to organizing your expenses on the expenses side of things with your bookkeeping you need to make sure that when you're using godaddy bookkeeping that your expenses are getting pulled in from only one place one of the biggest mistakes people make with their bookkeeping and i made this for years i had my expenses all over the place i was spending money on inventory supplies education with cash i was using multiple credit cards i was mixing personal account in my business account when i say business account i had one account that i was only supposed to use for business while i was co-mingling it one of the keys to setting up your bookkeeping and i'm going to say this again one of the keys to setting up your bookkeeping is to keep things separate you don't have to have an llc you could just be a sole proprietor but you need to make sure that you have separate bank accounts that you have separate credit cards that you have a separate paypal or payment processors depending on what you're utilizing everything has to be separate when you spend money on something personal outside of the business only use a credit card for personal if you're going to do something regarding your business only use a business bank account only and that could just be a checking account that you just you know you're titling it for business don't co-mingle bank accounts and credit cards so step number three set up a credit card or a debit card that you only use for business so again this doesn't have to be a business credit card right you can just maybe you have three credit cards now and you're using all three of them create a cutoff date right today is uh august 20th or something like that i don't remember make a cutoff date write it down in a notebook after this date this credit card maybe have a card is only being used for business so anytime you buy inventory at savers or goodwill use that credit card maybe you have credit cards attached to your ebay account or amazon for fees or your subscriptions only use that credit card any expenses that you're incurring for your business only use that credit card and don't use that credit card or that debit card for anything else but business the key is to organize because at the end of the year if there's ever um any questions that your your accountant has or if there's anything that doesn't match up you can say to yourself or you could say to your account everything that was an expense went on to this credit card that's step number three get a credit card or a debit card even a secured credit card if you don't have any credit and start to organize all your expenses going only through that credit card again you don't have to have a business for this you don't have to even get a new credit card just make sure that credit card that you use is only used for for your business purposes and i'll talk more about that okay step number four set up a business banking or a personal checking that you use only for business so this is same as the credit card just like we're having a credit card only for business we're not co-mingling personal it's the same with the income that's coming into you so amazon's going to pay you through your bank account ebay is going to pay you through your bank account you know any reselling platform that you're using they're going to pay you through your bank account make sure that the money that's coming in isn't going into one of your bank accounts that everything's going into like a lot of us like for me personally when i started selling on ebay and amazon i had income and personal stuff coming into my base bank account i had business coming in so it was like all co-mingled you have to set up a new account right you have to set up a business account so this could just be a personal checking account or a personal savings i'd recommend a personal checkings a checking account if you don't have a business but just create one that you separate create one that you only use for business so that's the key right now that's one of the most important steps when you're getting your bookkeeping in line to prepare yourself for tax season is making sure everything is separated everything especially if you have a business and you have an llc the key to having an llc like one of the reasons people have it is to you know use it as an umbrella against liability to penetrate through your personal if you're not separating things if there was ever a lawsuit that came through you know that could penetrate through the llc and then you can still get sued and your personal could still get affected again this is just advice from a guy on the internet but you want to split everything off split everything off so you know i'm going really deep into this right now because people they miss the point of this they they just don't understand you have to split everything off all the income that comes in has to only be going through a bank account for business all the expenses have to only be going through your account for business all the expenses could only be going through one credit card or you could have multiple credit cards but you have to make sure that you're not mixing personal in business with that so sorry for going so deep into that but that's like the key to this whole thing right now so step number five set up any new paypal stripe venmo's any payment processors that you're using for your business um it has to be separated so again it's the same story as your credit card it's the same story as your your bank account separate separate separate okay step number six now we're going to come down to the fun part and that's integrating your credit card your bank account your payment processors with the godaddy bookkeeping software or with quickbooks whatever you decide to use so there's a cool feature with these softwares that allow you to go in and actually integrate which means connect link up your credit cards your bank account so on and so forth with the software and this is where the magic happens because instead of you having a notebook or a spreadsheet and having to manually pull in all the data it'll automatically extract it'll automatically pull into the software based on the integration that you set up so it's really simple you just go in it'll give you steps for setting up paypal you just log in and then it connects it's the same thing with your bank account i'll have you sign into your bank account and then it'll just automatically connect and that's where the magic happens because when money starts coming in when income starts coming into your bank account from amazon or ebay it'll automatically pull into the software and start organizing it for you now that's not the last step but that's a very important step and it's the same with your expenses so for example i only have one credit card that i use for buying inventory anytime i go to thrift stores anytime i buy office supplies if i purchase a course if i travel if there's anything that's considered a business expense which we'll talk more about soon it's all coming through that that credit card or it's coming through a bank account any subscriptions or anything it's coming through a bank account or a credit card i try to mostly have it go through a credit card um because i want to be able to gain points and there's cash back so on and so forth so everything that's an expense is being pulled into this software um because i integrated it and i linked it up a lot of this comes down to just putting together a lot of upfront work this whole process isn't really going to make you any money over a couple days a couple weeks but it's going to save you so much stress so much time and when it comes to the end of the year in tax season you're going to be able to spend your time focusing on growing your business instead of trying to manage your business and manage the headache because you ignored it for years or you know i have a friend of mine good friend of mine i'm trying to get him set up doing this stuff and i'm gonna send him this video but now he goes it was like eight thousand dollars from last year because he never paid taxes because his books weren't online he didn't prepare he didn't plan we'll talk more about that so this in the short term yeah it's going to cost you some time you're not going to go to the thrift store as much you're going to be wasting a lot of time setting this up but this upfront work is going to pay you dividends for years and years and years so let's keep moving on so we talked about that we talked about integration and now once you do all that and you've got your separate business uh your business account which could be a actual business account with an ein number or just a a bank account that's like a personal checking you've got your credit card set up that you're only using for business you made sure that all your payment processors um are only for business it's not comming with personal you've integrated your credit card you've done all that stuff now you need to go through all your income streams like ebay and amazon and make sure all of your income is going through this new bank account okay so all your income is going through your bank account go through all your subscriptions right we all have different subscriptions that were subscribed to that could even be you know different things such as like internet and cell phone and talk to a cpa about this because there's certain things that you're going to want to have to go through your personal that only have like a certain percentage of a write-off so you don't want every expense going through like a business account i'll talk more about that i know i'm probably confusing you a little bit but in step number 10 i'm going to talk about a cpa and hiring a professional because there are some gray areas depending on where you live so on and so forth but now you want to go through and you want to check everything off you want to make sure you want to look through your old statements you want to you want to look through your bank account you want to you want to take a look at ebay and amazon and make sure like your listing fees your shipping through ebay and everything is being pulled from that credit card from that that bank account that you've set up just for business so this is just kind of like crossing your t's dotting your eyes kind of going through that process so this whole system of making sure your books are correct is only going to be as good as the data that you give the system as the input that's coming in if you don't set things up correctly if if you're not inputting things correctly the software is going to have bad data and you're just wasting your time okay so number nine is start categorizing your income expenses as they are being drawn into your godaddy bookkeeping account when it comes to accounting and bookkeeping you need to make sure that everything's classified correctly so let me give you an example so there's a whole bunch of different expenses and a bunch of different write-offs that you can write off as a small business there's advertising expenses they're expenses for your vehicle mileage contractors i'm reading from a list right now education and training employee benefits meals and entertainment miscellaneous such as bank fees or wages office supplies postage rent lease supplies travel so i'm gonna kind of put points number nine and ten together there's a whole bunch of different expenses right and there's different ways to classify certain types of income depending on if it's like a passive income source as like uh such as like a commission or uh something such as like getting paid out from ebay and amazon you got to talk to an accountant you got to talk to a professional now i know that's not what you probably want to hear in this video you want me to give you a response that checks off that box for you but you have to hire a good accountant or a tax professional who understands an inventory-based business because that's what we're talking about here an inventory-based business we're buying inventory and we're selling it it's much different than some other businesses especially internet-based businesses there's just certain things that your accountant and tax professional is going to need to know and when it comes to certain expenses that are coming in you've got to make sure that you classify it correctly you've got to make sure to classify it as advertising you have to make sure to you know make sure to classify your mileage correctly right there's only a certain percentage that you can write off you don't want to write it all off i'm not here to give you advice on that but you got to talk to a professional but ultimately at the end of the day when expenses start coming in you're going to have to make sure you organize it properly so you know you're going to have to organize your office supplies meals and entertainment when you travel supplies for the business certain things that you buy for the business are going to be considered like large pieces of equipment that you can depreciate now a lot of this stuff might be going over your head but that that's why you have to make sure that you link up with a good tax professional and ultimately i would say once you get all this stuff implemented you want to explain to him okay this is or him or her this is what we're doing here um you know i'm running this inventory-based business i'm planning on making this much money this much profit you know this is how my business works i buy inventory i spend money on supplies this and that and he'll kind of help you he or she will help you to organize and categorize these various expenses your income to make sure that everything is kind of put together properly so when tax season comes you'll be prepared and good to go so i feel like this last part is probably leaving you with a lot of questions but i don't want to give you my exact answers to like how i do it my business because i live in connecticut i'm in a certain income bracket i run multiple different businesses so the advice i'd give you could actually hurt you instead of benefit you so for this last part i mean you really have to talk to a good cpa but at the end of the day if you set up a good software if you separate all your income and your expenses with the credit cards the bank accounts if you have it pulled into this system and you're categorizing it correctly again based on the different things such as advertising contractors meals supplies equipment rent and lease travel all that stuff you're gonna be good to go make sure you save all your receipts because if the tax man ends up coming after you you always gonna have to prove yourself so save all your receipts set up a routine each month to go through all the inputs organize them make sure you categorize them each and every month save your receipts like i said and you know like i was mentioning before your books are only going to be as good and as accurate as the data that you feed it so you have to make sure you're not using a personal credit card when you go outsourcing because it's not going to get pulled in you're not going to get that write off you got to make sure that if you're making money on ebay and amazon or you have money coming in that it's actually getting pulled in through the software you have to set up all your integrations correctly and really at the end of the day the whole goal of this is to make sure that you pay the correct amount of taxes and as little as possible legally possible you don't want to overpay and you don't want to underpay and remember the the quote you know pigs get slaughtered talk to a cpa talk to a professional because there's a lot of people who will write every little thing off and they go around saying you know you know look how smart i am like you don't have to pay taxes you can just write everything off and that's great until you get caught until you get caught and it only takes one time to get caught where you can be in serious serious trouble with a lot of liability so make sure you talk to a tax professional i'm not a tax professional i'm not an accountant i'm not a lawyer i'm not telling you what to do i'm just sharing from my experiences this is the stuff that has taken me years to learn it's easy it's simple but set it up set up your software split your income split your expenses get a credit card or a debit card only for business make sure your income's only coming in through your business stuff your expenses are only going through the specific credit cards bank accounts organize it all integrate the softwares make sure your data is coming in accurately check it each and every month save your receipts talk to a cpa plan i do quarterly planning but i'm running three different businesses right now so it's a little more different but at least once a year talk to your tax professional let them know what are your goals how much money do you want to make and when the time is right it might be appropriate for you to set up a business i pay my my federal and state taxes monthly so i'm on payroll um it's a little bit different but i'm paying all my taxes monthly based on my projections um it used to be quarterly when i was an llc if you're not running a business i'm not exactly sure what you can do but maybe you can set up a bank account and based on how much profit you're making talk to your accountant based on what your tax bracket's gonna be and start putting money aside because the worst thing that can happen is if you're not the type of person to like save money and put it aside and kind of plan and be prepared the worst thing is you know you have 10 grand in your bank account at the end of the year and you're like i got 10 grand i feel good and now your tax bill is 12 000 or 8 000 and now you have no money put it aside put the 500 thousand dollars aside each and every month so you don't have to worry about it and it's not even your money i know it hurts to not be able to spend it and use it to grow but that's one thing that i you know i learned from my dad who is an accountant over the years is to make sure to you know plan prepare put money aside make sure that your taxes are covered so hopefully this video helped if it did be sure to smash that like button leave a comment down below i'll put links to some of the things that i referenced in this video and again please you know there's a lot of the stuff that you can do on your own but don't be scared to ask for help don't be scared to reach out to a an accountant don't be scared to ask for help and you know you got to find someone who's willing to be able to talk to you explain things to you because a lot of these cpas unfortunately they think that we've all gone to school for four to six years and know this stuff right school never taught us this stuff right that's what pisses me off with school it's like i left school with literally no skills and i had to learn all this stuff on my own and then a lot of these professionals they just expect you to know how to do this stuff this stuff's hard to learn at first but once you learn it it's easy it's like riding a bike it seems impossible then once you learn you're like you know i'm never going to fall off this thing so take the time put the up front work in to learn how to do this and with that being said much love and i hope this helps and i'll see you in the next one bye