Ecommerce accounting software that that syncs to QuickBooks & Xero

Three channels means three different settlement shapes

Each marketplace decides on its own how money reaches you, and none of them consulted your accountant. Amazon closes a settlement period and wires the net of everything that happened inside it. Shopify batches orders and pays a few days behind, with third-party gateways depositing separately on their own schedules. eBay slices order proceeds and pays out daily or weekly, holding some of it back.

A generic bank-feed rule treats all three as deposits and gives you three revenue lines that are actually net-of-everything cash. The month you add a channel, your reported revenue jumps for reasons unrelated to selling more, and margin becomes uncomparable across channels because each one nets out a different set of costs before paying.

Channel-aware journals fix the comparison. Every channel posts gross revenue on the order or settlement date, its own fee types to its own accounts, and its net through a clearing account that the deposit clears. Once that's true everywhere, revenue by channel means the same thing on every line, and so does margin.

One chart of accounts, or you'll never compare anything

The instinct when adding a channel is to create a parallel set of accounts for it. Do that three times and your profit and loss has forty lines, half of them near duplicates, and no way to see total refunds or total processing cost without adding things up by hand.

A better structure keeps one account per economic concept and separates channels with classes in QuickBooks or tracking categories in Xero. Revenue is revenue, refunds are refunds, and the channel dimension rides alongside. You can still open any account and see the channel split, and you can finally answer what your total fee load is as a share of sales.

Fees are the honest exception. Amazon referral and FBA fees, Shopify Payments processing, and eBay final value fees are genuinely different things and are worth keeping distinct, because that's where the channels actually diverge. What doesn't need duplicating is revenue, refunds, shipping income, or sales tax liability.

One more benefit shows up at tax time. A single consistent chart is the difference between handing your accountant a file they can work from and paying them to reorganize it first.

Consolidated COGS when the same SKU sells in three places

Multichannel inventory is one pool of units in several physical places. The same SKU might sit in an Amazon fulfillment center, a third-party warehouse, and your own shelves, and it can be sold from any of them. Cost doesn't change based on which channel sold it, so cost of goods sold should be calculated the same way regardless of where the order came from.

That means one landed cost per SKU, applied consistently: supplier price plus inbound freight, duty, prep, and the cost of moving units to wherever they're stored. Transfers between locations move inventory without creating income. When a unit sells, COGS posts against the same cost basis whether the order came from Amazon, Shopify, or eBay.

Do this and gross margin by channel becomes a real number rather than an artifact of how each channel reports. It's also the only way to answer the question that actually drives decisions: after fees, ad spend, and fulfillment, which channel makes you the most on this SKU? That answer often contradicts the revenue ranking.

Why a tool per channel costs more than the subscriptions

The obvious cost of running separate connectors is paying separately for each. The real cost is drift. Each tool picks its own account names, its own rounding conventions, its own clearing structure, and its own idea of when revenue is recognized. Three tools produce three dialects inside one ledger, and reconciling them becomes a monthly task that nobody enjoys and everyone rushes.

It also fragments the parts that should be shared. Marketplace facilitator tax gets collected by more than one channel and should hit one liability account, not three that each partly reconcile. Inventory is one pool but each tool sees only its slice. Refund rate across the business becomes a spreadsheet exercise rather than a report you can open.

Consolidating isn't only about the invoice. It's about having one mapping to maintain, one clearing convention, one inventory basis, and one month-end routine instead of three that each have to be remembered separately. BeanHawk charges flat rather than per channel specifically so adding a marketplace is a product decision instead of a budget one.

What multichannel month end actually looks like

Done properly, closing the month is a short checklist rather than a week of forensic work. Every channel clearing account should be at or near zero, and any balance points to a payout that hasn't cleared or an order that didn't settle. Amazon reserve and eBay funds-on-hold balances should match what the platforms report as unavailable.

Sales tax liability gets checked next: collected versus remitted per channel, with marketplace facilitator amounts clearing themselves and your own store's collections sitting there until you file. Then inventory rolls forward, opening units plus receipts minus sales and adjustments equals closing units, at landed cost.

What's left is the part worth your time: margin by channel and by SKU, refund rate, fee load as a share of revenue, and ad cost of sale where you run campaigns. Those numbers only exist if the mechanical work above was done right, which is the argument for automating the mechanical part.