You’re spending hours chasing receipts, fixing spreadsheet errors, and manually logging sales. Meanwhile, orders are coming in from all directions—your website, marketplaces, maybe even a retail store. Manual accounting may have worked when things were simpler, but it’s probably slowing you down now.
If your bookkeeping is constantly behind or if tax season fills you with dread, it might be time to rethink your process. Let’s break down five signs that you’ve outgrown manual accounting and need automation.
Reconciling means matching your orders with what appears in your bank account. For many e-commerce businesses, this means jumping between Shopify, Amazon, payment gateways, and QuickBooks—just to confirm the numbers line up.
If you're spending 5–10 hours a week trying to match order amounts, shipping fees, taxes, and refunds across platforms, you're not alone. It's one of the most time-consuming parts of e-commerce business accounting.
When reconciliation gets delayed:
Webgility helps by automatically syncing order data from all your channels into QuickBooks in real-time—so you’re not stuck doing it all manually.
Manual bookkeeping often leads to errors—especially when you’re selling across multiple platforms and tracking hundreds of transactions.
Common issues include:
With e-commerce accounting software, you can reduce manual entry and post transactions with just one click. This makes it easier to stay accurate and keep your books clean, especially if you're managing multiple sales channels.
When you're handling accounting manually, your reports are always behind. You may not see a profit and loss statement until weeks after the month ends—by then, it's too late to make timely decisions.
Without real-time visibility, it's also hard to:
An e-commerce accounting solution like Webgility syncs your sales, expenses, and inventory automatically, so your reports are always current. That way, you don’t have to wait until month-end to understand your performance.
Once you expand into more states—or start selling internationally—sales tax becomes a serious challenge. Many businesses still rely on spreadsheets or calculate tax per order by hand, which eats up a lot of time and leaves room for errors.
Manually managing sales tax often leads to the following:
To solve this, many e-commerce accounting software support tax mapping and integrate with QuickBooks’ tax features to automatically apply the correct tax rates and record them properly, helping you stay compliant without the heavy lifting.
As you expand, each new sales channel adds more complexity—more orders, more returns, and more tax rules to deal with. If your only solution is hiring another bookkeeper every time volume grows, your current setup likely won’t scale well.
This often leads to:
By automating accounting workflows with tools like Webgility, your team can handle high transaction volumes without increasing workload. That means you can grow without constantly adding people just to keep up with the books.
If your accounting feels more like a daily struggle than a streamlined process, you're not alone. As your e-commerce business grows, manual bookkeeping, mismatched reports, and delayed insights can start costing you more than just time—they can affect margins, compliance, and your ability to scale.
Here’s how to move forward:
Manual accounting can only take your e-commerce business so far. If you’re spending too much time on reconciliation, making frequent errors, or struggling to keep up with real-time performance, it’s clear that your current process isn’t sustainable as you grow.
These inefficiencies not only slow down your operations but also put your business at risk of missed opportunities and compliance issues. Webgility can help you integrate all your sales channels, automate daily tasks, and provide you with real-time financial visibility, all while syncing seamlessly with QuickBooks.
Ready to simplify your accounting and scale effortlessly? Book a demo to see how Webgility can work for you.
A manual accounting system is not feasible for most businesses because it’s slow, error-prone, and hard to scale. As your order volume grows, tracking transactions, managing inventory, and staying compliant with tax laws becomes more complex.
You know accounting is not for you if you constantly delay bookkeeping tasks, feel overwhelmed by spreadsheets, or struggle to track cash flow and profits. Similarly, if managing taxes, inventory, or payouts from multiple channels feels confusing, it may be time to consider hiring an e-commerce accountant or switching to e-commerce accounting services.
Manual accounting has several disadvantages—it’s time-consuming, prone to human error, and lacks real-time visibility. You may enter the wrong figures, misplace receipts, or miss important tax deadlines. For online sellers, the risks are higher because e-commerce business accounting requires tracking fees, refunds, and settlements across multiple platforms.
If a business doesn’t do any accounting, it can quickly lose track of profits, expenses, and taxes. This can lead to cash flow problems, missed tax filings, penalties, and even legal issues. For online sellers, ignoring e-commerce accounting solutions makes it difficult to manage multichannel sales, track inventory, and calculate accurate profits.