Basic Accounting

[T-Bone]

Ok heres my situation,

I sell about 100-150 items on ebay a month as a means to supplement my main income and have recently registered as a business on ebay and with hmrc (august 2008) to ensure everything is legal (unlike alot of ebay traders)

I have a couple of questions for the members of AVF;

1) I source the majority of my goods at car boot sales and am therefore unobtainable to obtain receipts for my purchases. What is the proper way in which to record these purchases?

I've tried googling it but i've found it quite difficult to find what I am looking for and when I phoned hmrc they weren't much help...

2) I need to calculate my gross profits in order to complete my tax return next year. In order to do this I need to devise a basic book keeping system or use a program that does the same job.

With me selling on ebay I could REALLY do with a program that imports all of my sales (inc sale price, reference number etc) with an inbuilt fee calculator, but after considerable searching I haven't found anything that comes anywhere near to achieving that!

I could REALLY do with some help on this so if anyone has any advice i'd appreciate it!

Anthony

[Mac Man]

Originally Posted by T-Bone

Ok heres my situation,

I sell about 100-150 items on ebay a month as a means to supplement my main income and have recently registered as a business on ebay and with hmrc (august 2008) to ensure everything is legal (unlike alot of ebay traders)

I have a couple of questions for the members of AVF;

1) I source the majority of my goods at car boot sales and am therefore unobtainable to obtain receipts for my purchases. What is the proper way in which to record these purchases?

I've tried googling it but i've found it quite difficult to find what I am looking for and when I phoned hmrc they weren't much help...

2) I need to calculate my gross profits in order to complete my tax return next year. In order to do this I need to devise a basic book keeping system or use a program that does the same job.

With me selling on ebay I could REALLY do with a program that imports all of my sales (inc sale price, reference number etc) with an inbuilt fee calculator, but after considerable searching I haven't found anything that comes anywhere near to achieving that!

I could REALLY do with some help on this so if anyone has any advice i'd appreciate it!

Anthony

I'd speak to a good book keeper or accountant.

They can advise on tax issues and suggest a suitable piece of software to do the job, assuming it's accounting software you're after.

[vnb]

Possibly worthy of further investigation for you is this:

http://www.etrader.uk.com/

Seems to fulfill what you want and most sage variants are very easy to work with.

[T-Bone]

Originally Posted by vnb

Possibly worthy of further investigation for you is this:

http://www.etrader.uk.com/

Seems to fulfill what you want and most sage variants are very easy to work with.

I think the Sage Tradebox Ebay software would do exactly what I needed it (and alot more besides) but it costs £298 for a year and just under £200 for renewal

To put things into perspective i'm not expecting to make more than £5,000 net per year so thats quite a hefty expense.

That said it would just come be classed as a business expense so it would be tax deductible but its still alot of money.

With the amount of lower volume ebay business sellers out there you'd think that there would be lots of custom made ebay/accounting software for a reasonable price or maybe £300 is reasonable!

[andykn]

There is a free accounting package called Turbocash:

www.turbocashuk.com

And I think there might have been something free on this month's PCPro DVD but I'll have to check.

No ebay integration as far as I know, though.

I would expect HMRC would accept your record of purchases provided it was obviously a contemperaneous record, in other words, just by looking at it, they could tell that you wrote down the value of purchases at the time you made them, not the day before an inspector turned up.

[Gordie]

Can I recommend a good workbook? Frank Woods Accounting 1