[GNC] Small business accounting importing transactions

[Stephen M. Butler]

On 11/26/19 5:46 PM, Robert Slippey wrote:
> Good evening,
>
> I'm a small business owner and been in business a few years. I'm sick of
> Quickbooks and I'm considering going to GNUCash, mainly to simplify. I
> looked at GNUCash many years ago but never looked too deeply at it.
>
> One consideration I'm concerned about is dealing with processing fees from
> the likes of stripe. I don't have an interest in keeping customer data in
> GNUcash and will only really use it for accounting. Invoices and payments
> are managed by a third party invoicing software (specifically Invoice
> Ninja)
>
> My question is, what best practices for dealing with the processing fees
> exist? I receive the funds in the bank after they've removed the fee and I
> was thinking just imputing a summary transaction in each month of the total
> cost of the months transactions as a simple solution. No need to see any
> further details.
>
> Do you have any further tips for moving over to GNUcash. I'll not I have no
> intention of bringing over previous years, we'll be starting fresh with
> GNUcash at the beginning of the year.
>
> Thanks
>
> Rob

Rob,

I have a small Squarespace business that uses Stripe for processing the
CC payments.  I have automated the download of the orders and load those
up into a SQLite3 database so I know the tax and shipping charges per
order.  I manually download the payments from Stripe to add in the
processing fees.  Several payments may be on each daily deposit (if I
were only that lucky to have daily orders).  I record in GnC the following:

Asset:Bank:Checking  -- Net amount deposited (Debit)
Expense:Fees:Stripe -- Total Processing fees Stripe chaged for all sales
that deposit (Debit)
Expense:Cost-of-Goods-Sold -- My total cost of items sold (see Inventory
side)  (Debit)
Income:Sales -- Gross sold amount (not including shipping and taxes) 
(Credit)
Income:Shipping -- Amount collected for Shipping/Handling (Credit)
Liability:State Sales Tax  -- State portion of sales taxes collected
(Credit)
Liability:Local Sales Tax -- Local portion of sales taxes collected (Credit)
Asset:Inventory -- COGS to deduct from Inventory (Credit)

Note that this is per Stripe deposit and not per order.  Several orders
may be summed up for each deposit.  I thought of summing up the entire
week into one entry but that would get messy when the bank issues a
statement mid-week.

I wrote a sql statement to get all of these numbers from the database. 
I manually enter these into GnC.  You could dump the output as a CSV and
import it into GnC to further automate it.  When I get to several orders
each day, then I'll make that effort (including the automatic download
of the payment file from Stripe).

-- 
Stephen M Butler, PMP, PSM
Stephen.M.Butler51 at gmail.com
kg7je at arrl.net
253-350-0166
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