How To Automate Your WooCommerce Accounting

Table of content

• WooCommerce Accounting
• How To Manage Your Accounting In WooCommerce
• Accounting Extensions for WooCommerce
• How WooCommerce Accounting Extensions Help Business Owners
• Important Elements to Consider Before Integrating an Extension
• 3 Helpful WooCommerce Accounting Extensions
• WooCommerce Accounting Key Takeaways

WooCommerce Accounting

If you own a WooCommerce store, we know you’ve got a lot on your plate! Starting with your product, going all the way through development, marketing, inventory management, store setup, and shipping, you’re handling a lot of different elements! One of those elements, and often the most daunting to WooCommerce store owners, is managing your accounting! It’s a necessary process to take care of but can also be incredibly time-consuming and challenging to understand if you’re not already clued up on bookkeeping.

At WordLift, we’ve developed an integration that makes it easier for new customers to find what’s in your store by creating software that automatically makes your products much more visible on search engines. We’re committed to taking the worry out of WooCommerce SEO. But are there other integrations that make WooCommerce accounting easier in a similar way? We set out to find out the best accounting automation for your business, so you have more time to build what you love!

How To Manage Your Accounting In WooCommerce

Accurate accounting is fundamental. It allows you to manage your finances for growth and production properly, keeps any employees and expenses adequately and timeously paid, and helps you stay compliant with local tax regulations. Traditionally when you think of accounting, you tend to think of someone sitting over a colossal paper ledger, carefully poring over columns of facts and figures.

Thankfully, most accounting is digitized in this day and age, making it much easier to keep records and much more viable to do your bookkeeping yourself as a business owner, rather than relying on an accounting professional. By far, the most commonly used bookkeeping software amongst eCommerce stores and brick and mortar businesses alike is the QuickBooks accounting suite, so for this article, we’re going to refer to QuickBooks compatible tips, tricks, and integrations.

The crucially important factors that you need to be tracking and recording in your store’s accounting processes are:

• Your profit: How much cash you have in hand after your expenses are deducted from the money you’ve taken. This will be all yours to spend and enjoy.
• Your incoming cash flow: How much cash comes into your business each month, down to the cent. This will help you grow by helping you figure out exactly where you should allocate funds.
• Your outgoing cash flow: How much cash you’re paying out from the business every month for expenses, salaries, operating costs, rent, and taxes. If you don’t keep track of these, you might not get them all paid in time.
• Your assets: The value of the materials your business owns. This includes your physical assets (like equipment) and your liquid assets (like your savings.)
• Your liabilities: These are any debts or loans your business owes and the interest charged on those.
• Your COGS – This means your “cost of goods sold.” Though technically part of your expenses, you should record this separately, too.

Your WooCommerce store will generate some of these figures for you, but the more complex numbers you will need to generate yourself and add to your QuickBooks records. This takes lots of time and expertise, which you may not necessarily have. Thankfully, some integrations and extensions can make finding these figures and syncing them to your bookkeeping software much easier!

How WooCommerce Accounting Extensions Help Business Owners

Starting an eCommerce business and being proficient at understanding accounting complexities are not the same thing. Developers internationally understand this, so they’ve created a ton of extensions to help you automate your accounting process. These extensions will use computer programs to combine your customer’s behaviours and your already-entered data through code to generate accurate figures that make sense and add that data to your accounting programs without you having to lift a finger!

These extensions in the WooCommerce store can be totally free or come at a premium. The right combination of extensions will streamline your accounting process to immediately get accurate, easy-to-understand data.

When you’ve got accurate accounting data, you never need to worry about coming up short on payments or in your tax process. You’ll have a perfect indication of how much money you can put back into developing your products and marketing to grow your reach and income further. Cleverly using extensions for your WooCommerce accounting can take all the anxiety out of your accounting process and let you focus on the real passion behind your business.

Important Elements to Consider Before Integrating an Extension

What a WooCommerce extension (or plugin, as they are commonly called) does is alter the code of your website to allow it to perform different functions. Think of this as going under the hood of a car and adding in new parts to help it do more things. Maybe a hydraulic lift to alter the suspension or some LED lights plugged into a battery to make it more exciting to look at.

Though all of the extensions you add may work as bits of code on their own, sometimes, they get in the way of each other. Certain functionalities of these extensions may interfere with the “space” that other extensions take up. If you add conflicting extensions, they may interfere with one another or the functionality of your store as a whole.

In the WooCommerce store, most extensions will indicate if they have certain elements that cause conflict. If they don’t, most development teams behind this software will have a support channel that you can contact to help you figure out any problems if they arise.

3 WooCommerce Extensions to make Accounting Easier

Now that we understand why accurate accounting in eCommerce is essential, how extensions could help you achieve that, and some important considerations you should take before adding any extensions, let’s take a look at some of our favourite accounting extensions for WooCommerce:

MyWorks QuickBooks Sync for WooCommerce

The MyWorks QuickBooks Sync for WooCommerce integration is an incredible time-saving tool. What the integration does, in short, is allow your WooCommerce store to communicate with and send information directly to your QuickBooks accounting software. All of the accounting data that your WooCommerce store generates is entered into your accounting software in real-time. You don’t have to spend hours figuring out where figures go, and your books will always be up-to-date, without the possibility of human error. 

Another exciting feature of the MyWorks suite is that it can perform a two-way sync up to every 5 minutes. This means that if you change fields in QuickBooks, they will auto-update in your WooCommerce store, and your inventory will always stay up to date. The MyWorks support team is available for contact 24/7 and incredibly hands-on, too! 

The basic MyWorks QuickBooks Sync for WooCommerce integration is totally free, and premium plans start at $19 per month.

ReadyCloud

On its surface, ReadyCloud may appear to be primarily a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) extension. It’s got an impressive, modular set of features to make your customer interactions more manageable, all located in one main menu. Where it really shines, however, is in its return and refund functionality and ability to create customer profiles. 

The plugin generates uncomplicated, comprehensive data that is much easier to record in your bookkeeping than a basic WooCommerce return would be by streamlining the returns process. The extension also automatically generates customer profiles and tracking numbers upon sales. This means that you can now create an individual customer profile for each customer in your books, which may provide an excellent opportunity for tracking consumer spending behaviours and improving your business model. 

You can try out ReadyCloud for free, and paid plans start at $24 per month.

Oliver POS

If you’re running both an online store and a brick-and-mortar retail store simultaneously, accounting for your inventory can be an absolute nightmare. If both portals are making sales, you may need to consolidate your books every night to stay on top of everything. Oliver POS is here to solve that problem. 

Oliver is a Point of Sale that can be integrated into both your eCommerce store and physical cashier stations. This plugin helps those two platforms stay in continuous communication, balancing the inventory between them and ensuring you never encounter the accounting nightmare of selling one item twice! In essence, Oliver POS allows all your customers, online and in front of you, to buy from the same WooCommerce store. This means you never have to do two sets of bookkeeping! 

Oliver POS also features a free trial, and basic plans start at $19.99 per month.

WooCommerce Accounting Key Takeaways

This article covered why accurate accounting is so crucial for your WooCommerce store and what that might need to include for your business. We’ve also taken a look at what WooCommerce integrations are, how they might help ease the burden of accounting, and what considerations you should bear in mind before installing them.

Finally, we gave you a run-down of our favourite extensions that make accounting in WooCommerce much easier and help business owners automate the parts they might not want to spend time doing.

If you’re interested in these extensions, try them out for free to see if they work for you. In the meantime, we recommend that you use the advanced SEO automation tools offered by us at WordLift to bring more eyes to your WooCommerce store at the click of a button!

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