Bookkeeping, nobody's favorite task, get very important to the online seller. It's a good idea to keep track of your sales and the money you've made, as well as your expenses. Here are some easy ways to do this. PayPal. This is the primary tool for money collection on eBay. And there are tools on the PayPal site that allow you to download your transaction totals.

I suggest using a separate paypal account for your online business so you don't mingle your personal transactions with your new sales and transaction fees. Once you log into PayPal, you can receive reports either by the month or customized by date. There are a year end summaries as well that are helpful when taxes are due. More on that later. Excel or Google spreadsheet, this one is easy to use, make some columns with the items sold, how much you bought it for, how much you sold it for, and shipping and listing fees. All that info can be found by the transaction on eBay.

Once you have your lists full of numbers, you can easily add things up by highlighting and using the sum formula to the column. This should be tallied every month for your records to see how you're doing. GoDaddy bookkeeping, this one is my personal favorite app and I highly recommend it. It requires a monthly or yearly payment. Though there is a free trial to see if it will work for you. Once it is set up, it imports all my paypal transactions, my eBay transactions along with my bank account and credit cards to one can add any manual transactions and it shows you the profits and the expenses for your new biz.

I also love the ability to categorize the various types of transactions, eBay, shipping supplies, fees, etc. At year's end with a simple click, a profit loss form can be printed or uploaded into a program like TurboTax under the heading of schedule C for income tax purposes, talk about a time saver. I do review my transactions either daily or by the week to make sure they are under the right category. QuickBooks or Quicken. I know other sellers that use these accounting programs and love them. It just depends on your personal needs and willingness to sort out things financially.

EBay, there's an area for sellers to gather info on sales and fees. It is free to use but you must poke around the site to find the info you're looking for. Go to ebay.com and under seller account to see each individual transaction and related fields. You can also find your account summary and current balance as well as all account activity, along with credits and promotional savings. All these tools are easy to set up. They're easy to use, some have automatic features, and all will lead you to a clear view of your bottom line.

How much money you're making, the better records you keep that The easier it is to report to the IRS. Don't forget to list your expenses to. My best advice is to check with an accountant when setting yourself up. Here's a time saving tip. There's a convenient option for paying your eBay fees. Set up your PayPal account under automatic payments.

Set it up once and forget about it. Here's the money saving tip. Ask PayPal for a PayPal debit cards and use that card to pay your monthly eBay fees. You will get 1% back from PayPal each month. After all cashback is cashback