Consolidated Transactions: A Game-Changer for Managing Finances

In today’s fast-moving world, accounting practices for ecommerce businesses have evolved in leaps and bounds. Finale Inventory’s new feature, consolidated transactions, is reshaping the world of accounting, changing how inventory management software connects to QuickBooks Online. But why does it matter? How does it help sellers?

Understanding Consolidated Transactions

At its core, consolidated transactions simplify financial reports by grouping similar entries together. It ensures that financial statements are presented at a manageable level of detail. Instead of sifting through countless individual transactions, accountants can view summarized data from various sales channels, providing a clearer picture of the financial health of a business. 

For example, you have three stores: Amazon, Shopify, and your brick-and-mortar storefront, and you want to see how they are performing over time. Let’s look at Amazon, where you sell apparel. Looking at the sales numbers, you can see that week one had more sales than week two, by about 20% more than your average from this marketplace. This is contributing to your increased monthly sales numbers over the other locations/timeframes.

But let’s say you don’t want week-over-week comparisons. Let’s say you want to look at each month’s consolidated transactions by each webstore, marketplace, or physical location to make sure your numbers match what QuickBooks Online is presenting, therefore effectively balancing your books without sifting through thousands of transactions. By looking at this data, the business owner and their accountant can get a consolidated view of how each location is doing and/or compare how each month is doing, which will allow you to evaluate the business’s profitability and make better decisions.  

Now that consolidated transactions have been explained let’s jump into how it benefits Finale users.

1. Finale allows users to define how journal entries like credits/debits are grouped and how to set the criteria for the summarization of transactions. This granularity can prove pivotal when defining how transactions are specifically fed into the journal entries for consolidation.

2. Made an error or have new data? No worries. Finale lets you re-open previously approved consolidated transactions to either modify existing information or add new data to account for returns, canceled or updated sale shipments, and information for receivables/invoices. This ensures that your consolidated reports are always up-to-date and accurate.

3. With Finale, you can effortlessly generate monthly consolidated transactions compatible with both Finale and QuickBooks Online. This prevents system crashes due to data overload and fosters a responsive user interface. By employing consolidated transactions, you significantly reduce the number of individual entries pushed to QuickBooks Online and receive a single summarized journal entry on landed costs and COGS.

To configure consolidated transactions, check out our help article.

Even better, a feature that works in tandem with consolidated transactions is our segment-by-sales source. Sales sources are seamlessly configured in Finale, with default options for new accounts and automatic creation of sources for integrated platforms like Shopify, Amazon, or eBay. This allows for accurate order categorization, whether orders are imported or created within Finale, allowing for easy tracking of order origins, such as by phone, email, or online. You can even independently summarize each marketplace’s income and respective payouts. This granularity enables you to reconcile and report income from diverse sales sources easily, creating a simplified view of how a specific product, location, or marketplace is doing. 

Finale Inventory is always updating our platform to give users the best inventory management features to help them build their businesses and enhance their profitability. And for businesses in the modern era, efficiency, and accuracy in accounting isn’t a want; it’s a need. Consolidated transactions offer a path to simplified yet comprehensive financial reporting. Save yourself and your accountant’s time with Finale’s consolidated transactions. 

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