Tagging Payments from Elance

Accounting
1

My business bank account has received multiple payments from Elance (platfrom where services are bought and sold)

I’m unsure of how to tag/report these because:

  • the payments to my bank account are made up of a combination of smaller payments from various clients
  • the invoices that are automatically created within Elance for each client are in US Dollars (so not really much use)

Does anyone else have any experience with tagging/reporting Elance payments?

Can I define Elance as the ‘client’ and then create invoices for these payments? (would make life so much easier)

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Phil

2

Whether you create an invoice on the QuickFile side for every individual Elance client or just group all the jobs for each day/week/month as a single QuickFile invoice (like you would for a retail shop) depends how fine grained you need the data to be at your side for reporting purposes. I’d start by enabling multi-currency features if you haven’t already, then create a USD-currency merchant account for Elance payments. You’d then create QuickFile invoices in USD to match the Elance ones (or daily/weekly aggregates if that’s the way you go) and mark these as paid into the merchant account. The GBP payment to your own bank account is then a “bank transfer between accounts” where you can specify the USD amount that Elance tell you they sent and the GBP amount that your bank received.

3

Hi Ian, thanks a lot for your reply.

I’ve followed your advice.

Separate question: Elance charge an 8.75% fee every time a client makes a payment - should I tag this as ‘Bank Charges’? Or another tag?

Thanks

4

Yes, I’d create a purchase for bank charges or sales commission or whatever you think is most appropriate (presumably in USD) and “pay” it from the merchant account, just like you would for PayPal or a card payment provider.

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