Streamline Your Etsy Invoices for Personnel Easily

Etsy invoices for Personnel

hi there Janet with paper and spark here today we are going to chat about Etsy's new billing system what's changed from the way it used to be whether or not this affects your Etsy seller spreadsheet or your Etsy import add-on if you happen to be using one of those and how to interpret the numbers that they're showing you now I've gotten a lot of emails about what the changes mean how to interpret the changes how to reconcile them with the old system what this means for using your spreadsheet if anything changes so I just want to walk through the answers to all those questions and hopefully will be a quick video to help you just you know see everything in action and explain some of this stuff so I finally have gotten the new dashboard rolled out to me as of yesterday November 7th not everybody has it yet but I think at least probably half of Etsy sellers have it at this point you'll know you have it when you see a new button next to your finances and then once you click on your payment account if you scroll down and see these circles then you know that you are now the lucky recipient of being on the new Etsy system so just to put this in context let's talk about the way that Etsy used to bill you so that you can understand what's changed now so keep in mind that Etsy charges several different types of fees there's really three different types of fees that ETSU charges you the first is the credit card processing fee and that in the u.s. at least has been three percent of your order total plus twenty five cents so twenty five cents and three percent of your order total and they actually apply that to your order total including shipping received including any sales tax collected on that order and including any VAT that might be collected on your order which is I'm not too up to speed on that but it's sort of like a European tax on digital goods from understand so 3% plus 25 cents applied to that amount is taken out of your order total at the time of sale previously it never showed up on your bill it only showed up on your Etsy order CSV right here in column Z as your credit card processing fee if you've been using the Etsy seller spreadsheet and you import in your CSV I've been automatically totalling that expense for you as you go and you've been deducting that for your net profit or loss statement so so that's the first fee the credit card processing fee they also charge this transaction fee which I like to call the Etsy commission this is the thing that recently increased this summer it's now 5% of your total sales and it's applied to all those same numbers I just said your sale total your shipping collector from your customer sales tax collected and that so 5% of that is taken out as Etsy's transaction fee I like to call it their commission finally we have the listing fee which is 20 cents every time you list something new or renew manually or Auto renew a listing you have that that 20 cent listing fee so those are like the three big fees at Etsy charges now to understand the change in the billing system previously like I said that credit card processing fee would come out immediately at the time of sale and then Etsy would deposit your steal amount minus that credit card processing fee to your account you know however often you had it set up like once a week you me I think you can make it daily whatever whatever you had wanted to do and then you'd pay this big monthly bill for your transaction fees and your listing fees plus any other money that you owe debts you like for shipping labels or advertising or promoted listings or whatever so you'd have that big bill usually do between the 1st and the 15th of the next month for that prior month's sales but now if you're on the new billing system you are now paying all those additional fees not just a credit-card processing fee but the transaction 5% fee the listing fees etc you are now paying those at the time of sale they're basically taken out of your deposit amount of what your deposit amount would have been at the time of the sale so all of the same fees are still getting charged to you as on the old system the amount of money is the same no matter which system you're on it's just the timing that's different and that's I open for a lot of us because when you're forced to see that money coming out at the time of sale instead of letting it accumulate as a bill you get a little bit better of a handle on how much profit you're actually making on the sale right because you're forced to see the the amount that's left over after Etsy takes all their cuts from your sale item so that's what I want you to know has really changed it's just the timing of the payments so let's shift gears real quick and talk about your spreadsheet the good news is that with these billing changes nothing has changed on the Etsy order CSV that you import into your Etsy spreadsheet all the columns and the amounts and everything are still the same so you can continue using it just as per usual I have had a few people tell me that they have had trouble finding the CSV now it is under settings options download data and then you can go here get that order CSV for whatever month you need and download it and import it as per usual so settings options download data that is where the CSV that you need to use your spreadsheet lives ok the next thing I want to talk about is how to interpret these two circles because one of the other questions that I've gotten is that when people look at this info they don't understand exactly what's included what's not included they don't understand how it correlates to what we used to see which was this summary on the your bill screen now that we don't have a bill anymore we don't understand how this ties to what we are seeing so let's talk about that I'm going to take a look at September 2018 for a reference sake so here is the monthly statement for a September you've got the circle here with sales and credits this fees and taxes circle and then a list of all your individual activity transactions down here let's start by talking about sales and credits this circle right here is basically your sales amount minus those credit card processing fees so this is equivalent to what used to get deposited daily or weekly into your account on the old system it's your total sales amount including shipping paid to you including sales tax collected minus those credit card processing fees at three percent plus twenty five cents per transaction that is what these sales and credits mean then we have the fees and taxes circle over here so the this fees and taxes circle does not include the credit card processing fee that is already taken out of your sales over here that credit card processing fees still unfortunately is not listed separately anywhere the only place you can find it is if you use the ETSU seller spreadsheet and you download that Etsy order CSV this is the only place where you're going to see and be able to easily sum up that credit card processing fee so keep that in mind it's not showing up over here what is showing up over here is that 5% Commission or transaction charge that Etsy has your 20 cent listing fees any marketing expenses which are going to be things like google shopping ads promote a listing or targeted campaigns that you can get with that see your shipping labels if you pay Etsy for postage will show up here if you pay for pattern or Etsy plus or it's a premium or whatever the heck those are called these days that will show up here as well the only other thing that I want to note about this weird circle is that the box is called fees and taxes there are no taxes included here I have yet to see a month that has any sort of taxes included in this circle they're not including any sales taxes that they've collected for me they're not including any of those marketplace sales tax that they are paying on the sellers behalf for states like Washington and Pennsylvania I feel like this is a misnomer as of right now there's no taxes showing up I'm not sure if maybe eventually they're gonna put something like that in here but as of the time I'm recording this I don't see any tax stuff in here so you can think of this blob right here as the amount that you used to be billed for on a monthly basis and it's now being taken out at the time you make a sale so if you want to break those things down into a list of like your sale transactions you can look at the activity list down here so here we have I sold a spreadsheet we had this transaction type fee taken out this is EPS ease 5% cut and then here I am receiving the actual money this was the cost of the spreadsheet and this feed that's taken out is that at the processing credit card fee okay that amount that is being netted and then goes up here so this is the total of all these sale lists of all these seal activities with the order total amount minus the credit card processing fee if you told it up all these net guys they should equal this and then we've got the listing fee and then you're gonna see your marketing your shipping and all your other individual stuff right here but that is how to interpret these guys so finally I want to talk about how this affects those of you that are spreadsheet users the biggest thing that's going to change is simply that the look of these instructions need to be updated now we you can still import in that CSV as per usual but the screen we're but the video and the PDF pages where I walk you through entering your bill changes because we don't have this summary of this month's activity basically you can just use this circle instead the the only thing that may need to change for you could be the timing so previously you might have paid your bill the month after you accumulated those fees and you may or may not have recorded your bill payment in the month that you actually had the fees or you might have recorded it the month after if you paid it the month after that's simply just a timing difference now we are paying them as we go so what you need to do going forward is is on the first to say October when you're going enter your when you're going update your books for September you would enter these fees here as your Etsy fees for the month of September because they came out of your sales and you paid them in the month of September so you'd want to go through theoretically and enter Etsy fees of this amount I'm okay recording the entire amount that entire $87 as the Etsy listing and transaction fees if you have shipping here as well you probably want to break that out separately and enter it on your yellow postage tab which I don't have because I don't pay postage so I just delete in mine but you guys should have that yellow postage tab you can enter those shipping fees separately and then enter the remaining amount as the Etsy fees I think it's fine to lump in your marketing and your pattern and Etsy plus or whatever else you're paying at C for just total it up and enter it here so that's pretty much the only thing that really affects you is you you're not going to see this screen anymore you're gonna base it off of this box instead and one more thing that I want to mention because I've had some people who are looking back at prior months and looking at what they entered on their spreadsheet and saying that this amount is different than what they entered on their spreadsheet so what causes that difference could depend on several different things I don't want you to freak out too bad because chances are over the course of the year it's gonna balance out because it's probably just a timing difference like you might have work like I know with me I'm recording these bills in the month that I paid them so like I have 74-64 entered for April and this is now showing up as my March statement but I paid my March bill back in early 2018 before these changes were made I pay down April first so that's why I ended up recording it in April so you might just have some tiny differences like that if it's not a tiny difference it could be something that happened retro actively after you did your books and recording that you might see like you might have refunded something and got some of this transaction feedback and that could have caused a small change but I really wouldn't worry too much about it because the important thing is just that over the course of the year you want this amount that you paid towards Etsy to just match the twelve bills that you've the twelve monthly statement minutes that you've got here that's the important part you just want to make sure that you're recording on these expenses so that you can get them in your books and deduct them on your tax return and take that good business expense deduction for your shop so all that you really need to do from this point forward is at the end of the month with the new milling system check out your monthly statement see what your fees are for that month and enter that as your Etsy listing and transaction fees and the month that you paid it because you are paying now during that actual month it's coming out of your sales at the time of each and every sale so Etsy is just totaling up the fees that you're paying that month for you with this handy little circle so I hope that this gives you a little bit more clarity on what's going on with a new Etsy billing system if you're having any trouble interpreting the bills that you're seeing and entering things on your spreadsheet feel free to reach out to me comment on the video shoot me an email at hello at paper inspark comm and I will work with you to hopefully you throw alright guys I hope that that makes sense I will talk to you later bye