Now is the time to figure out a way to keep track of your eBay income!
Read the following article from the NineMSN Money site. “eBay sellers beware, the ATO is coming!”.
As you will read in the article you don’t have to worry if you are just selling the odd item on eBay or having an ‘online garage sale’. But for those of you who are intending on having eBay as a major source of income you need to start keeping track of income and expenses. And YES doing a tax return if required!!
I admit that I am useless at bookkeeping and the thought of keeping financial records does not excite me. I’m also not running a large enough eBay home business to warrant having an accountant running after me, plus I don’t want the expense of having to pay someone to do it. So what do I do??
Outright is an online bookkeeping site that is recommended by eBay. It connects to your eBay account and grabs all your transactions.
The eBay transactions that it currently records are:-
- insertion fees
- final value fees
- buyer payments ( it gives separate records for sale price, and postage cost, that are payed by buyer)
- PayPal fees
You can input your own transactions that eBay doesn’t track. For example:-
- postage expenses
- purchase cost of your inventory
- any other income you may have, eg. affiliate income.
Outright is not just for eBay sellers. You could use it to track the finances of any business you have whether it be online or offline.
It’s definitely worth looking at if, like me, you have no idea how to keep track of your income and expenses.
Post a comment and let me know what you think of it, or if you know of anything better to track your eBay business with.
Update March 2011:- Earlier this year Outright made the decision to start charging a subscription fee for their site. As this is now not a free service I am no longer using it.
Declaring ebay income ato.. I like it