The manual version does not scale
At ten orders a week, someone keying them into the accounts is tedious. At a hundred, it is a part-time role, and it is a role that produces errors nobody notices until the year end.
This is one of the clearer automation cases in a small store, and it is also one of the easiest to configure wrongly.
What has to be right
- Tax treatment per product and per destination — the thing most often wrong
- Payout reconciliation — matching the gateway payout to the individual orders
- Fees recorded as expenses rather than netted off invisibly
- Refunds and partial refunds handled properly, including the tax
- Currency, where you sell internationally
Payout reconciliation is where most syncs fall down. The bank receives one figure covering forty orders minus fees, and matching that back is the work.
Summary or line by line?
| Approach | Suits |
|---|---|
| Individual invoice per order | Lower volume, needs order-level detail |
| Daily summary journal | Higher volume, cleaner ledger |
| Summary plus detail on demand | Most growing stores |
Individual invoices at high volume make the ledger unusable. Summaries lose the detail some businesses need. Decide with your accountant before configuring anything.
Involve the accountant first
The single most useful thing you can do is have your accountant specify the mapping: which Shopify concept becomes which nominal code, and how tax is treated in each case.
That conversation takes an hour and it prevents the far longer conversation about correcting a year of entries.
Reconcile in the first month
For the first month, check the synced figures against the Shopify reports weekly. Discrepancies found early are configuration issues; found late they are corrections.
After that, a monthly reconciliation is enough and it should be a five-minute job rather than an investigation.