New Sole Trader confused about Etsy & Accounting

I’m still in the process of setting things up and figuring things out with QuickFile so do bear with if my question here is super simple to answer!

I’m using QuickFile to keep track of my sales and expenses as a sole trader, and to do all the tax stuff and HMRC things sole traders need to do here in the UK. I know you have to keep track of expenses and profits so you pay the correct amount of tax each year. And I know that means you have to log all your reciepts as proof of expenses.

But do you have to do the same for the money you earn through the business? I know invoices are used for this purpose, but some of my earnings come through Etsy, and here’s where I start to get confused.

Etsy doesn’t offer much in the way of a document that shows or proves the amount of money they pay into your bank account. You can see/save your order reciepts, but these show the amount the buyer paid - before Etsy took its own fees. So, that’s not useful for accounting I suppose?

Or they have an option to download a CSV file the amount the buyer paid and then all of the individual fees Etsy take from and just looking at it makes my brain hurt so I don’t know how I’d be able to use this in accounting. Plus, this still doesn’t show the actual amount of money that Etsy pays into my bank account, does it? Screen shot of the CSV for my latest Etsy order below as an example:

So still, I have no clue how to show my earnings from Etsy for my accounting. I also still don’t know if I really even need to? I’ve been uploading my bank statements so it does show the money that Etsy is sending me, I just can’t find a way to offer proof of it the way one would use an invoice, and I don’t know how I might use QuickFile to solve this.

I realise this topic is all over the place, but any insight at all into anything here would really put my mind at ease! Thanks in advance

See if this helps How to list Etsy sales without invoice creation

or simply tag money coming in bank to sales and do one journal at month end to cover charges from etsy
Dr selling charges (Etsy charges)
Cr Sales

Hi thank you! I had already looked through that thread and to be honest I don’t really understand it. Like the OP says, you don’t issue invoices for Etsy sales and using the .cvs files as proof doesn’t seem to make sense.

For example in the above screenshot of my latest sale in .cvs, ALL of that is a really convoluted and unclear way to show that in reality, the buyer paid £16 to Etsy, and Etsy paid £13.50 to me. I never see that £2.50 of Etsy’s own takings so I’m not sure why or how I would include it in my accounts.

Tagging the money coming in as ‘Etsy Sales’ seems the best option but again, is that going to be enough for when it comes to taxes and HMRC? I just want to do this as simply as possible but worry about doing things wrong and getting in trouble with the government!

Thanks,
Maddie

Just keep the backup on bulk sales entry, you don’t need to replicate every entry from selling platform to accounting software

really sorry but I’m not too sure what that means - do I just need to keep the cvs on file somewhere and leave it at that?

yes say your monthly sales are 10k, you do one entry on QF and keep as backup that csv

Regardless of whether you see the fee or not it still forms part of your turnover, so you have to account for the gross sale and the fee as an expense.

Okay I think that solves my problem, thank you!

That’s useful to know, thank you!

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