What to track, how to track it, and why getting your bookkeeping right from the start saves you time, money, and stress at tax time.
For a reseller, bookkeeping means keeping accurate records of four main things: income (what you sold and for how much), cost of goods (what you paid for each item before selling it), platform fees (what each platform charges per sale, listing, or subscription), and operating expenses (postage, packaging, photography equipment, and other business costs).
Most resellers start with a spreadsheet — and a spreadsheet can work when you're selling a few items a month. But as volume grows, the manual work becomes unmanageable. Tracking 50, 100, or 200+ sales per month across multiple platforms, matching payouts to sales, reconciling fees, and recording each item's purchase cost is genuinely difficult to do accurately in a spreadsheet. Errors compound, items get missed, and by tax time the records are unreliable.
The ATO requires Australian businesses to keep financial records for at least five years. These records must be sufficient to allow you to accurately calculate your taxable income. For resellers, that means being able to show what you sold, what you paid for it, and what your expenses were — all matched up and reconciled. Spreadsheets that are manually maintained are hard to audit and easy to get wrong.
Built for resellers
Platform imports, automatic fee reconciliation, per-item COGS tracking, and ATO-compliant records — all without a spreadsheet.
Connect eBay, Depop, Shopify and more. All your sales data in one place, automatically.
Sales, fees and payouts reconciled automatically — no manual cross-referencing required.
Track cost of goods at the item level — see true profit after every cost, on every sale.
Franked keeps records in a format that meets ATO requirements — for five years, automatically.
FAQ
The ATO requires you to keep records of all income, cost of goods purchased for resale, platform fees, postage and packaging expenses, and any other business-related costs. These records must be kept for at least five years.
Cost of goods (COGS) for resellers is the amount you paid for each item before selling it. For each purchase, record the date, item description, and amount paid. When the item sells, you match the sale to the purchase to calculate your gross profit per item.
Revenue is the total amount received from sales. Profit is what remains after deducting cost of goods sold, platform fees, postage, and other business expenses. Many resellers focus on revenue but are actually making very little profit once all costs are accounted for.
The ATO requires you to keep financial records for at least five years. This includes invoices, receipts, bank statements, and records of all income and expenses. Records can be kept in digital or paper form.
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