keeping track of business

[phoenix_top_drawer]

Here is a question for all you people who are good at keeping track of shipping and payments.
We have tried to keep a record book but somehow ended up losing it in our last move.
Now we are in the process of ramping up our sales and need help in keeping track of everything.
Does anyone know of a simple form to use that we can track payments, shipping, tracking numbers and so on. As our business grows we have to get better organized.

thanks, phoenix

[deltone]

Phoenix, do you have Excel? I created a very basic excel spreadsheet and it works well for me. You'd have to know how to use Excel though. It's not perfect but it is very helpful.

[mevans_dot_net]

I also use Excel. You can keep track of thousands of auctions on a sheet in as much or little detail as you decide. You can make up formulas so you automatically know your profits per auction, isolate taxes paid and collected, and sort so you can easily find tracking numbers, ship dates, whatever it is you're looking for. Then at the end of the month, I email the file off to my accountant. I know some people use programs like Quick Books but I had Excel already on my system and its worked fine for years now with my auctions.

[whoscloset]

I too use Excel. I know from past experience that Access would work even better but I've been too lazy to set it up.

Excel spreadsheets work great for all the records you need to keep track of.

Monique

[phoenix_top_drawer]

Hello deltone, mevans and whoscloset

Thanks for the quick candid responses. I am always amazed and pleased at the willingness of some Cdn. Power Sellers to share "proprietary" information. We do have Excel- XP on 1 machine, Windows 98 on another.
Joanne is computer competent. I am a complete luddite. I regard computer geeks with reverence not disdain or fear.
What's our next logical step?

Thanks again

Brad

[deltone]

Brad, do you know how to use Excel? If you'd like, I could send you a copy of my Excel, which like I said, is pretty basic, but does the job. You could always add to it, or remove cells you deem unimportant to you. I also use Filtering on it so I can easily see who has paid, all items shipped on a particular day, etc etc.

I paste all my stuff onto the spreadsheet, straight from my ended auctions. In other words, I do a search of all my ended auctions, including email addies. I set it so it will show the last 200 auctions on one page (assuming there ARE 200 auctions still in the system).

I then highlight the whole thing and paste it into a blank MSWord sheet. It gets pasted in table form. I then highlight, one at a time, each column.......when I've highlighted a column I paste it onto the excel sheet. Some of them (cept the item # and email addy) I do a "paste special" "text" so that I don't get all the formatting from explorer. Both the item #'s and email addies go in as LINKS so by clicking on them later, it takes me right to the auction, or gives me an email window.

My explanation might not be very clear, but trust me, it's so easy and saves a lot of typing. Truthfully though, there are probably others who wail come along with a MUCH better and easier system, but if you want a copy, let me know.

deb

[mevans_dot_net]

I do the same thing, highlight right from my ended auctions but I paste straight into excel without going through MSWord. I'm assuming Deb does that because the columns are in a different order on eBay vs her spreadsheet but I have my columns set up the same - ie. item number, start date, end date, sold at, auction title, high bidder (important so you can sort by bidder and easily see all the auctions a bidder won and still has open regardless of the amount of time between auctions). Then from there I have the cost, PST paid, GST paid, shipping cost, GST paid on shipping, total paid, GST if charged, PST if charged, profit, eBay fees, Paypal fees, transaction closed (important for sorting so you can get the closed ones out of the way). There's formulas in there to calculate everything on the fly and pasting from the website does keep the links which is nice - I can click the item number from my excel to go straight to the auction.

I AM bit of a computer nerd but this is something you can set up without much problem. Give it a try - highlight some rows from your ended auctions and put your "curser" in the cell where you want your table to start in Excel and press Control "V". Add in some other info like I've mentioned above in other columns, use more or less info, whatever you need for your business. Formulas are easy to set up, this is a simple example:
column A=cost
column B=total paid
column C=fees
column D=shipping cost
column E=profits

so the formula on column E would be =B1-(A1+C1+D1)

This will automatically calculate your profit - what your customer paid less your cost, fees and shipping cost.

Then at the bottom you can have more totals, use the sum feature. I have a running total of what the auctions sold for (for my PS status), and totals for any of the other columns, ie. profits year to date, eBay fees to date, Paypal and GST/PST year to date. So when I do my RST payment to the government, its all right there in the totals, takes me less than a minute to fill out the form.

[phoenix_top_drawer]

Deb
Thank you so much for your kind offer. Brad is out and about right now looking for stuff while I'm at home attempting to sort through what we have to list.

If you could send me your template I should be able to figure out how you are using it. Your explanation seems clear enough.

Our goal is to become silver power sellers over the summer. It's going to take much better organization than we have been doing.

thanks so much
Joanne

[muminlaw]

deltone & mevans, have you tried this copy and paste with the new My EBay? Seems to me that the new format is going to make this a little more complicated. If you've got a work-around, I'd love to hear it! I don't qualify as a nerd, quite, but I'm fairly computer savvy and I've used Excel for years for all our bookkeeping.

I appreciate your input! Glenda

[deltone]

Glenda, I don't use MYEbay. What I do is a search of my id ended auctions and I put a checkmark beside the "show email addies". I had never thought to use Myebay. LOL

I might try what Mevans does and change the order of my columns as it is a bit of a pita copying to MSWord and then recopying to Excel, although it doesn't take long. I'm sure there are MANY ways I could improve what I'm doing but you get in a rut and just keep things the same.

I particularly love using the filtering though as it makes things SO easy to find stuff. Like if someone emails you but doesn't include the item #, you can search using the email addy.

Joanne, I will send you a copy of the excel sheet. I have to tweak it a bit first just to make sure you get one that doesn't have some of my garbage in it.

I'll email it through the "ask the seller a question" link.

[phoenix_top_drawer]

Deb
Thanks so much. With our new goals I feel slightly overwhelmed.

[muminlaw]

Thanks Deb -- I never thought of using the member id search route! Maybe that was a little too logical for me?? But I can see where that has everything you need from eBay except the fees and they're easy enough to find.

This seems like the ideal way to simplify the GST & PST reporting -- don't know why I never thought of it except that I was trying to get my listing program's system to do it for me and they're not set up for all our levels of sales tax. This way even allows for a column and formula for any day's exchange rate! Super - thanks again to both of you for going into detail on this.

Glenda

[deltone]

I simply created a formula to calculate both the Ebay and Paypal fees. It's far from perfect but for the most part does the trick.

[systemagic]

Please forgive my ignorance.

"What I do is a search of my id ended auctions and I put a checkmark beside the "show email addies"."

How exactly do you search your ID ended auctions? Is this just cutting and pasting from the "Listing Details" from each individual "End of Auction - Item Purchase" email or is there a way of finding more than one at a time?

[muminlaw]

Hi Systemagic,

At the top of the page, click on the "search" button, then on the next screen there's a row of tabs starting with "basic search" which is the default. Click on the Seller tab, then enter your own user ID in the box, check the "show email addresses" button, choose how many days of ended auctions you want shown and how many entries per page. Then click "search" by the box where you entered your ID -- that should get you a list of all the completed auctions within the time you chose.

Nothing to forgive! If you haven't had occasion to use those features, how would you know?

Glenda

[systemagic]

That's Great Glenda!

I've been using Excel from the start but have been entering the fields manually. This will give me more fields in less time.

Thank-you so much!

Marty

[deltone]

Phoenix, I have not forgotten about the spreadsheet. I've been trying to tweek it and I got in the middle of some other stuff but I promise, I've not forgotten and will get it to you asap.