Traditional bookkeepers are trained on service businesses, B2B companies, or brick-and-mortar retail. Ecommerce breaks nearly all of their assumptions.

Here’s where they get it wrong:

COGS Allocation
They record supplier invoices as a single lump sum. We allocate costs accurately across SKUs, so you know which products are actually profitable.

Revenue Recognition
They book your full Shopify payout as revenue. We reconcile gross sales, returns, discounts, shipping, and platform fees, so your P&L reflects reality.

Multi-Channel Reconciliation
Selling on Shopify, Amazon, and wholesale quickly breaks their systems. We reconcile multi-channel ecommerce businesses every day.

Inventory Accounting
Most bookkeepers don’t understand perpetual inventory in an ecommerce environment. We track inventory flow, shrinkage, and valuation with precision.

Payment Processor Fees
Stripe and PayPal fees are often misclassified or inconsistently recorded. We map every fee correctly, giving you true margin visibility.

Ecommerce Metrics
They deliver a generic P&L with no insight into contribution margin, customer acquisition cost, or channel profitability. We build reports around the KPIs that actually drive ecommerce growth.

The result:
Your books may be technically compliant—but strategically useless.

With EcomNumbers, your books become a competitive advantage, not just a compliance requirement.

Here’s what we hear all the time:
“My bookkeeper keeps the books balanced, but they don’t understand my ecommerce business.”

Traditional bookkeepers weren’t trained for ecommerce. They don’t understand:

- How to properly allocate COGS across multiple SKUs and sales channels

- Multi-channel revenue reconciliation (Shopify, Amazon, and wholesale)

- Platform fees, payment processor fees, and how they impact margins

- Inventory accounting for ecommerce (not retail, not manufacturing)

- Key ecommerce metrics like contribution margin, ROAS, and LTV

The result?
Your books may be technically “correct” for tax purposes, but useless for making real business decisions.

EcomNumbers is different:
We’re bookkeepers who specialise exclusively in ecommerce. Every transaction is categorised with your business model in mind. Every report is built to show what actually matters—product profitability, channel performance, true margins, and cash flow.

You’ll finally have books that don’t just satisfy your accountant—they help you run and grow your business.

Your accountant:
Handles tax strategy, tax filing, compliance, year-end adjustments, and high-level tax planning. They need clean books to work from.

EcomNumbers:
We provide those clean books. We handle the monthly bookkeeping—categorising every transaction correctly, reconciling all your channels, tracking inventory, and delivering reports you can actually use to run your business.

Think of it this way:

- We give you the accurate, real-time financial data you need to make business decisions each month

- Your accountant uses that data once a year to optimise your taxes and file returns

Most accountants love when their clients work with us because they receive organised, accurate books instead of a shoebox of receipts and a Shopify CSV file.

We work with your existing accountant—we’re not trying to replace them. In fact, having both usually saves you money because your accountant spends less time cleaning up your books.

You can absolutely find cheaper bookkeeping—there are plenty of $500/month bookkeepers out there.

But here’s what 7-figure ecommerce founders tell us they were dealing with:

With their $500/month bookkeeper:

- Books were months behind (couldn’t make real-time decisions)

- COGS was wrong (thought they were profitable when they weren’t)

- Shopify transactions were lumped together (no SKU-level visibility)

- Inventory was a mess (couldn’t trust stock values)

- Had to spend 10+ hours/month fixing and interpreting everything themselves

After switching to EcomNumbers:

- Books closed by the 10th of each month

- Know exactly which products and channels are profitable

- Can make pricing, inventory, and ad spend decisions with confidence

- Recovered $20–50K in missed deductions and inventory corrections

- Got back 10+ hours/month to focus on growing the business

The question isn’t “Can I find cheaper bookkeeping?”
It’s “What’s it costing me to have books I can’t actually use?”

If you’re pre-7 figures or comfortable with DIY, we’re probably overkill.
But if you’re scaling and need your numbers to be decision-ready, not just tax-ready, the ROI is clear.

We understand the urgency. Here’s our typical timeline:

Week 1–2:

- Connect to Shopify, Xero, and your other platforms

- Review historical data and identify issues

- Clean up categorisation errors and reconciliation problems

- Set up a proper chart of accounts for ecommerce

Week 3:

- First clean monthly close delivered

- Strategic review meeting—we walk you through what we found and what it means

- Identify quick wins (pricing opportunities, unprofitable SKUs, etc.)

Ongoing:

- Books closed by the 10th of each month

- Real-time access to accurate data in Xero

- Monthly review calls to discuss trends and recommendations

Most clients have their first “holy shit, NOW I understand my business” moment within the first 2 weeks, when they see properly categorised books for the first time.

We've seen it all—and we mean all:

- 2+ years of unreconciled bank accounts

- COGS entered as one monthly lump sum (or not at all)

- Revenue recorded incorrectly (just Shopify payouts, no reconciliation)

- Inventory that’s never been counted or valued properly

- Personal expenses mixed with business

- Multiple Shopify stores with no consolidated view

- "I've just been winging it and hoping my accountant fixes it at tax time"

Messy books aren’t a disqualifier—they’re exactly why ecommerce-specific bookkeeping exists.

The good news? Once we clean things up and build the right systems, staying clean is easy.

Most of our clients had a mess when they came to us. That’s normal for fast-growing ecommerce brands.

There’s no judgement, only solutions. The first step is always the hardest.

You probably need us if any of these sound familiar:

Red flags:

- You can't confidently answer, "What's my profit margin by SKU?"

- Your bookkeeper doesn’t understand why Shopify revenue ≠ bank deposits

- COGS is recorded as one monthly total (not allocated by product)

- You’re making pricing decisions based on Shopify’s dashboard alone

- Inventory value in your books doesn’t match reality

- Your accountant asks questions at tax time that you can’t answer

- You’ve caught categorisation errors that make you wonder what else is wrong

- You spend hours each month trying to piece together accurate numbers

You’re probably NOT ready if:

- You’re doing less than $500K/year in revenue

- You’re comfortable with DIY bookkeeping and have the time

- You’re not planning to scale, raise capital, or sell in the next 2–3 years

We’re built for established Shopify brands that need accurate, decision-ready books—not startups still finding product-market fit.

Our sweet spot is Shopify + Xero—that’s where we’re fastest and most efficient.

- If you’re on Shopify but using QuickBooks Online: We can work with QBO, though we find Xero is better suited for ecommerce businesses. We can help you evaluate if switching makes sense.

- If you’re on WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or another platform: We can likely help, but there may be additional setup complexity. Let’s discuss your specific stack on a call.

- If you sell on Amazon, Walmart, or other marketplaces in addition to Shopify: Perfect—we handle multi-channel businesses regularly.

- If you’re Shopify-only or heavily Shopify-based and willing to use Xero: You’re our ideal client. Let’s talk.

We work month-to-month with a 30-day satisfaction guarantee.

- If within your first 30 days you don’t feel we’re delivering significantly cleaner books and better clarity than what you had before, we’ll refund your first month—no questions asked.

- We can make this guarantee because our onboarding process is thorough. We review your current setup before you commit to make sure we’re the right fit.

- You can cancel anytime with 30 days’ notice. No long-term contracts, no setup fees, no surprises.

Not at all—it’s about maintaining quality.

Each new ecommerce client requires significant upfront work:

- Reviewing 6–12 months of historical data to understand your business model

- Cleaning up and recategorising incorrectly booked transactions

- Setting up proper Shopify-to-Xero integration and workflows

- Building custom reports for your specific product mix and channels

- Reconciling multi-channel revenue, inventory, and COGS properly

This takes 15–20 hours of intensive work in the first month.

We’ve found that onboarding more than 5 clients per month compromises the quality and attention each client deserves. We’d rather serve fewer clients exceptionally well than many clients adequately.

If we’re at capacity when you reach out, we’ll put you on the waitlist for the following month and send you some resources to help in the meantime.

We take data security seriously:

- Read-only access to your bank accounts (we never have withdrawal permissions)

- Bank-level encryption for all data transmission through Xero and Shopify

- Two-factor authentication required on all accounts

- Signed NDA before we access anything

- SOC 2 compliant tools and processes

- Regular security audits of our systems

We only access what we need (Xero, Shopify, payment processors) to do the bookkeeping. We never share client information or use your data for any purpose other than serving you.

Your data is backed up, encrypted, and accessible only to your dedicated bookkeeper on our team.

That’s exactly why bookkeeping needs to be done right in the first place.

If your books are poorly categorised and your reports are generic, even CFOs would struggle to make sense of them. It’s not you—it’s that your books weren’t built for decision-making.

What we deliver:

- Clean, properly categorised books in Xero (organised for ecommerce, not confusion)

- Reports that show what matters: product profitability, channel performance, true margins

- Monthly calls where we walk through everything in plain English

- Clear recommendations: "Stop carrying this SKU," "This channel is underperforming," "You have a cash flow gap coming in Q2"

Our job is to make your numbers simple and actionable. If something doesn’t make sense, that’s on us to explain it better not on you to become an accountant.

You don’t need to be good with numbers. You just need a bookkeeper who actually understands ecommerce.

Our core service is ecommerce bookkeeping—but done at a CFO-led standard.

What we include:

- Monthly calls to review trends and discuss what the numbers mean

- Guidance on profitability, inventory management, and cash flow

- Recommendations when we see opportunities or red flags

- Books that are clean and ready if you pursue an acquisition or exit

What we don’t do:

- Detailed financial modelling or scenario planning

- Deep SKU-level profitability analysis and optimisation

- Acquisition or exit preparation and due diligence support

For 8–9 figure brands that need fractional CFO services, we recommend Judith Hobdell. Judith specialises in strategic financial leadership for established ecommerce businesses, including forecasting, acquisition prep, and the high-touch support that larger brands require.

For most 7-figure brands, accurate ecommerce-specific bookkeeping solves 90% of their financial clarity problems—and that’s where we excel.