QuickBooks Classes for Sales Channels: Setup and Limits

Yes, you can use QuickBooks Online classes to track each sales channel. Create one class per channel (Amazon, Shopify, eBay, wholesale), tag every transaction with it, and run Profit and Loss by Class to see which channel makes money. It works well, but only on the Plus and Advanced plans, and only if the data going into those classes is clean. For Amazon sellers, that second condition is where most setups fail.

This guide covers how to set classes up for channels, where they break, and how to decide whether you need them at all.

TL;DR

• Class tracking is available only in QuickBooks Online Plus and Advanced. Simple Start and Essentials need an upgrade.
• Plus supports up to 40 classes and locations combined. Advanced is unlimited. Keep your channel list short.
• Since May 2026, QuickBooks’ native Amazon, Shopify and eBay connectors import payouts with fees and refunds, which covers much of what sellers used classes for.
• Use classes for the question “which channel is profitable?” Use payout-based reconciliation for the question “does my bank match my books?” They are different jobs.

Table of Contents

• What a class does for a multichannel seller
• Check the plan and the limits first
• Decide whether classes are the right tool
• How to set up channel classes
• The class structure we recommend
• Where class reporting falls short
• The bigger problem: what goes into the class
• A worked example
• Don’t forget reimbursements
• Our perspective
• Where BeanHawk fits
• Related setups for other channels
• Learning QuickBooks properly
• FAQ
• Sources

What a class does for a multichannel seller

A class is a tag you attach to a transaction line. Intuit describes classes as a way to categorize transactions into segments such as departments, product lines or locations. A sales channel is simply another segment.

Once your sales, fees, refunds and cost of goods carry a channel class, you can run Profit and Loss by Class and read a column per channel. That answers questions a plain P&L cannot:

• Is Amazon’s margin, after referral and FBA fees, higher than your Shopify margin after payment processing?
• Are eBay returns eating the profit on a product line?
• Did the wholesale channel carry the quarter while retail was flat?

Without classes, revenue from every channel lands in the same income accounts, and you can only separate them by building a separate income account for each channel. That is the other common approach, and we cover the trade-off below.

Check the plan and the limits first

Before designing anything, confirm what your subscription allows.

The plan details come from Intuit’s class tracking guide, and Intuit publishes a separate page on usage limits by subscription tier. Check both before you commit, because limits and plan names change.

The point sellers miss is that the 40 is shared. If you already use locations for warehouses, or sub-classes for product lines, each one eats into the same pool. A seller with five channels, eight product categories and three warehouses is already at 16 before any growth, and that is without nesting channel by product.

Decide whether classes are the right tool

Intuit’s own guidance is to check whether another feature fits better before you turn on class tracking, so your class list does not fill up with things that belong elsewhere. The Intuit guidance points to location tracking for multi-site operations and Projects for job costing by customer engagement.

For an online seller, the choice usually looks like this:

If you are choosing between classes, locations and Projects and want to think through how each categorizes income and expenses, this accounting-focused guide from a New England lender shows how finance teams think about structuring categories before they scale. Our own view: pick one dimension for channels and stick with it.

How to set up channel classes

1. Confirm your plan. You need Plus or Advanced.
2. Turn on class tracking. Follow Intuit’s steps to turn on class tracking, and decide whether to assign one class per transaction or per line. For channel tracking, one per transaction is usually enough, and per line is only needed when a single invoice mixes channels.
3. Create one class per channel. Keep the names plain: Amazon US, Shopify, eBay, Wholesale. If you sell on Amazon in more than one marketplace, decide now whether those are separate classes or sub-classes.
4. Add a class for non-channel activity. Overhead such as software, accounting fees and your own salary does not belong to any channel. Create a Corporate or Unallocated class, or leave those lines blank deliberately, and be consistent.
5. Tag sales, fees, refunds and COGS. A channel’s profit is only real if its costs carry the same class as its revenue. If you tag sales but not fees, every channel looks wonderful.
6. Run Profit and Loss by Class monthly. Review the “not specified” column. Any money sitting there is a tagging gap.

Intuit’s get started with class tracking article walks through the settings and reports in more detail.

The class structure we recommend

Keep it flat, small and boring.

• Level one: channel. Amazon, Shopify, eBay, Wholesale, Other.
• Optional level two: fulfillment method, for example Amazon FBA versus Amazon merchant-fulfilled, since the fee structures differ.
• No product-level classes unless you have a short, stable product list. SKU-level reporting belongs in inventory and COGS tooling, not the class list.

The last point matters for anyone searching how to handle SKU-level cost of goods in QuickBooks. Classes are a poor fit for SKUs. A catalog of hundreds of items will blow through the Plus limit of 40, and every SKU class is another thing to maintain. Track cost per SKU through your inventory costing and purchase orders, post the cost of goods as a journal by channel, and use classes only for the channel split. Our guide to building an ecommerce chart of accounts shows how to arrange the accounts underneath.

Where class reporting falls short

Classes give you a channel view, but QuickBooks Online’s native class reports have rough edges that matter at month-end.

• Inactive classes stay in your reports. Intuit’s Community confirms that inactive classes still appear on Profit and Loss by Class and cannot be filtered out. Retire classes sparingly.
• You cannot remove the Total column. A thread about P&L by Class totals shows Intuit treating it as a feature request, with report customization as the only workaround.
• Budgeting by class is awkward. Users in one budget versus actual by class thread describe it as a stopping point and end up in Excel. If you plan channel-level budgets, test this before you rely on it.

None of these is fatal. They are reasons to export to a spreadsheet for board-style reporting and to keep your class list lean.

The bigger problem: what goes into the class

A class is only a label. If the underlying entry is wrong, you get a precisely labeled wrong number.

Historically, Amazon sellers imported summarized sales, so fees, refunds, reimbursements and adjustments were netted together or missing. You could tag that entry “Amazon” and still have a P&L that did not match what Amazon actually deposited. Intuit’s own Community shows the same pattern with Shopify, where a user complained that the native integration recorded sales as net values and made fees hard to see.

Intuit has since rebuilt this. Its new e-commerce connectors, documented in May 2026, replace the OneSaas apps and the earlier Commerce connectors and import sales, refunds, fees and payouts. They reconcile by payout, linking orders, refunds and fees together. Intuit says to rely on those payout integrations instead of forcing every channel into manual class mapping.

That changes the advice. If your connector already separates each channel’s payouts and fee lines, you may not need classes for reconciliation at all. You might still want them for management reporting.

Order-level posting versus settlement posting

There are two ways to put marketplace data into your books:

• Order-level: every order becomes a sales receipt or invoice. Detailed, but it can create thousands of entries a month and rarely matches the bank deposit cleanly.
• Settlement-level: each payout posts as one summarized entry with sales, fees, refunds and adjustments broken out, so the deposit in your bank matches a single journal.

We compare both in order versus settlement posting and describe the setup in our payout-first multichannel accounting guide. For most sellers, settlement-level posting with a channel class on each journal gives the cleanest result.

If you also run your own storefront, the same logic applies to your card processor. Merchants who use a payment processing provider for online businesses should make sure its payouts are imported and matched the same way, rather than booking gross sales and hoping the deposit lines up.

A worked example

Say a seller has three channels and a Plus plan.

Classes: Amazon, Shopify, eBay, and Overhead. That is four of the 40 available.

Month-end routine:

1. Import or post each channel’s payouts, with sales, fees and refunds on separate lines.
2. Tag each journal with its channel class.
3. Post cost of goods sold for each channel with the same class.
4. Run Profit and Loss by Class and check the “not specified” column is near zero.
5. Reconcile the bank deposits against the payout entries.

In the report, the Amazon column now shows sales, referral and fulfillment fees, refunds and COGS. If Amazon’s net margin is five points below Shopify’s, that tells you something real: maybe fees on certain SKUs, maybe returns. If the Amazon column is missing lost or damaged inventory reimbursements, it will look worse than it should, which brings us to the part nobody tracks.

Don’t forget reimbursements

Amazon sometimes loses or damages inventory in its warehouses and is supposed to reimburse you. Those reimbursements are income that belongs in the Amazon class, and unclaimed ones are money you never booked. Our explainer on what FBA reimbursement is covers the basics. If your channel P&L does not show reimbursements as their own line, you cannot tell whether Amazon is paying what it owes.

Our perspective

We build accounting automation for Amazon and multichannel sellers, and we see the same pattern. Sellers start with classes because they want to know which channel makes money. That is the right question. But they often get stuck, because the classes are being applied to entries that were never accurate to begin with.

Our view is that the order of operations matters. First, get settlements posted accurately, with every fee, refund and adjustment visible on its own line. Second, make sure the numbers reconcile to the bank. Only then add classes, and keep them to the channel level. A clean five-class setup on accurate data beats a 40-class setup on net-sales imports every time.

We also think sellers should be skeptical of any tool that tells them accounting automation is free in exchange for a cut of recovered money. Our pricing is flat by order volume, and we never take a commission on recovered funds, so the incentive is to find you every dollar.

, Tim

Where BeanHawk fits

BeanHawk posts summarized settlements for every channel to QuickBooks and Xero, tracks COGS and landed cost, and monitors FBA inbound shipments and ledger events for lost or damaged inventory you can claim. Plans are Free at $0 per month, Starter at $19 per month, Growth at $49 per month and Scale at $99 per month, based on order volume. You can start with a free FBA reimbursement audit to see what Amazon may owe you before changing anything in your books. If Amazon is your main channel, our Amazon accounting software page shows how the QuickBooks side works.

Related setups for other channels

Channel needs differ, so the details change:

• Shopify sellers should also review payment processor fees, covered in our Shopify accounting guide.
• eBay sellers deal with managed payments and its own fee types, covered on our eBay accounting page.
• If you are unsure whether the Amazon connection works at all, read whether QuickBooks integrates with Amazon.
• For month-end matching, see how to reconcile QuickBooks Online for Amazon sellers.

Learning QuickBooks properly

If you or your bookkeeper are new to class tracking, Intuit’s guidance is to learn from its structured training. The ProAdvisor Academy is free for accounting professionals and includes self-paced courses and live webinars. Business owners without a ProAdvisor login can use Intuit’s help articles linked above, which are updated regularly.

FAQ

Can I use classes in QuickBooks Online Simple Start or Essentials?

No. Class tracking is available only in Plus and Advanced, so Simple Start and Essentials users need to upgrade first. If you cannot upgrade, separate income accounts per channel are the usual workaround.

How many classes can I have?

Plus allows up to 40 classes and locations combined, while Advanced has unlimited capacity. Because the pool is shared, count your locations before you plan your channel classes.

Should I track each SKU with a class?

Generally no. SKU-level classes quickly use up the limit and are hard to maintain. Track SKU cost through inventory and purchase order costing, and use classes for the channel split.

Do I still need classes now that QuickBooks has Amazon and Shopify connectors?

Not for reconciliation. The new connectors import payouts with fees and refunds, which Intuit recommends over manual mapping. Classes are still useful if you want a per-channel profit report.

Sources

• Track your transactions by class or dimension, Intuit
• Create and manage classes in QuickBooks Online, Intuit
• Learn about usage limits, Intuit
• Intuit guidance on choosing between classes, locations and Projects
• Turn on class tracking, Intuit
• Get started with class tracking, Intuit
• Inactive classes in class reports, QuickBooks Community
• Removing totals from P&L by Class, QuickBooks Community
• Budget vs actual by class, QuickBooks Community
• Shopify integration net values, QuickBooks Community
• Migrate to the new QuickBooks Online e-commerce connectors, Intuit
• Training and certification, Intuit ProAdvisor Academy

Recommended

• QuickBooks Amazon Integration: Setup Guide
• NetSuite vs QuickBooks for Amazon Sellers
• Payout First Multichannel Accounting Setup
• Order vs Settlement Posting: Best Multichannel