Software\Service to monitor our ecommerce cash flow?

[amiz]

We are running an ecommerce website that have this cash flow:

Orders:

1)Users place orders on our website on our propriety PHP platform – each order has a unique order ID with one or more item\product in the invoice

Billing:

1)Credit card billing via authorize.net and other payment providers
2)PayPal
3)Google checkout
4)Wire

expenses:

1)We are Paying more then 40 suppliers after ~30 days (we get one big invoice for many unique order ID’s and in some cases we get invoice for “Product Name” X “quantity” without reference to order ID )
2)We pay also DHL\UPS on a monthly invoice for the shipping
3)We pay some service providers to do some custom work on the products themselves
4)We buy materials to help us fulfill the orders (packages) – this can be one big invoice every 3 months
5)We do PPC and SEO marketing
6)We pay salaries
7)Payment providers take their fee
8)General expenses

discrepancies:

1)returns and refunds
2)Chargebacks


Question:

We want a service or a software that we will use to input all our data to make sure
That we are not over paying our supplier’s and to monitor our gross margins on a monthly and also on order or group of orders level.

For example we want to know that in order id 123456 we charged the customer for 100$
We paid the supplier 40$ , UPS 10$ , payment provider fee was 2.5$ and our gross margin on this order was 47.5%.

We want to repeat this check on a group of orders from supplier X in time frame Y

What do you recommend? Do you know any software that can do it
Or do we need to program it in our back office?

Thanks,

[RhinoFish]

Some order management platforms have some of these features.

You described an ecommerce store, do you have some sort of order management system hooked to its backend?

Here's an example of an Ecom platform mated with an Order Management platform, one that speaks QuickBooks, estimates profits on discrete orders:
www.volusion.com/partners/atandra/

Here's a list of some order management platforms for a popular (cheap) Ecom platform, you can find many here:
www.bigcommerce.com/apps/order-management/

[votrechien]

My first reaction is you're trying to micro-track in far too great of detail, although I suspect you were partially 'thinking out loud' in some points of your post. I don't know if there's any off the shelf software that will do everything you want. But with that aside:

we get one big invoice for many unique order ID’s and in some cases we get invoice for “Product Name” X “quantity” without reference to order ID)

If your supplier doesn't provide invoices with something as basic an order ID you couldn't obviously import the data into whatever platform you're using. The UPS fees they're charging you are likely variable so there's no real way you can get your numbers to completely lineup with theirs to do a flawless audit. I know we have a lot of suppliers who struggle to even send us a PDF invoice every month rather than a mailed hard copy and you probably do too. To get the amount of precision you want I don't think is realistic in a lot of the cases.

What I do is simply do a random audit of invoices, and audit a few lines. My experience in many years of doing this is almost all suppliers are honest about doing this and for as many unfavorable mistakes they make, they make just as many favorable mistakes.

payment provider fee

This should be easy enough to add in because everything follows a pretty standard rate schedule. Probably not the most useful thing though because most payment providers tend to have the same rates +-1% so probably consider it by default in any calculations you do.

4)We buy materials to help us fulfill the orders (packages) – this can be one big invoice every 3 months
6)We pay salaries
8)General expenses

I don't think you'd want to try and assign these costs on a per product level. Possibly packaging but even that is a slippery slope.


Now if you want a software solution where you can view a group of orders in a certain time frame for a certain supplier, many order management software suites will do this for you (I know ours, Linnworks, will do it) although you're not going to boil down the expenses quite as much as you're looking for.

[JackieBlue]

Isn't this part of what a financial system is for? I use Quickbooks and can pull reports for all of this information.

[votrechien]

Isn't this part of what a financial system is for? I use Quickbooks and can pull reports for all of this information.

If you're doing a lot of online orders you almost need a separate order management suite. Quickbooks is great in many ways but doesn't give anything close to the amount of attention needed for individual orders (and it doesn't pretend to either).

[JackieBlue]

Votrechien - we are exclusively online on several marketplaces. The op mentions having to pay his invoices and invoice profitability. These are financial transactions and you should use an accounting system - whether QB or something more robust. We track our orders by marketplace and state/country, items, etc. Our invoices are entered, we have reminders to pay items, payment terms built in, etc. This is standard stuff.

[amiz]

Thanks for the answer

So basically you are saying that if I will input all the data to QuickBooks I can have this information?

If I get one big invoice from a supplier I can bind segments of this invoice to the relevant order ID in our system?

[particleman]

Sounds like you need a more high end accounting program. Look into Microsoft Dynamics. You would have to create some integration with your website but it is capable of doing it.

[JackieBlue]

You probably can do it with Quickbooks - I am not an expert in your data, your mileage may vary. But, something like MS Dynamics (as mentioned above), xtuple, or others would give more functionality.

It sounds like that, so far, you are not using any financial software whatsoever. That is dangerous when running a business. You have to have a bookeeping system, either manual (nightmare for e-commerce) or computerized.