Reference
Where the ledger
has to tie
Can the accounting package run the stock? It can hold stock, but it's a valuation system, and stock control needs an availability system. The two answer different questions on different clocks.
What an accounting package owns, where it stops, and the four reconciliations that break first when a storefront, a stock system and a ledger have to agree.
Valuation isn't availability
An accounting package answers what the stock was worth at a moment that's already passed, in a form an accountant and HMRC will accept. A stock system answers what can be sold in the next thirty seconds. Both hold a number called stock, and it isn't the same number.
What the ledger owns
Stock value at period end, cost of goods sold, margin after landed cost, VAT treatment, and the audit trail behind all of it. These are accounting questions and an accounting package answers them properly.
What it can't own on a real catalogue
Live availability across channels, allocation between a website order and a trade order landing in the same second, multi-location stock, and replenishment. It wasn't designed for that job.
Where the line usually falls
One channel, one location, a catalogue in the hundreds and slow movement: the accounting package can carry stock, and a second system adds cost for no gain. Multichannel, multi-location or fast-moving: it stops, and it stops quietly.
How it announces itself
Never with an error. It shows up as oversells during a promotion, a stock figure staff have learned not to trust, and a month-end that takes days because the spreadsheet reconciling the two has become the real system.
The four reconciliations that break first
Settle each of these before the architecture is chosen. Settled afterwards, each one becomes a monthly manual job that nobody owns and nobody costed.
Payouts against orders
A storefront produces individual orders. A payment processor produces batched payouts, net of fees, on a lag, sometimes spanning a period end. The ledger sees a lump sum that matches no order, and it's the one of the four that makes revenue look wrong rather than merely untidy. On Shopify with Xero it's one of four flows that have to cross, set out on the Shopify and Xero page.
Landed cost
Duty, freight and handling are incurred long before the sale and often in another currency. Where they are captured decides whether the margin figure on a product is real. Capture them nowhere and gross margin reads better than it is, and pricing decisions get made on it.
VAT across channels
Some VAT is collected by the marketplace rather than the merchant, some by the storefront, and the treatment differs by destination. A ledger fed only from the storefront reports a position that's confidently wrong on the channels it can't see.
Returns and their timing
A return moves stock, revenue and often a fee, and rarely in the same period as the sale. Whether the stock comes back saleable, damaged or not at all is a warehouse fact the ledger can't know unless something tells it.
How a system physically connects (native app, middleware, bespoke, or a scheduled file drop) and where each breaks is on the systems reference. Where stock truth should live is on stock and fulfilment, and which system holds it is on stock control software. The payouts-against-orders problem starts one layer up, in whatever is making the order promise.
Choosing the accounting side
Xero, Sage, QuickBooks and NetSuite each hold stock value differently, and the right one depends on where stock truth lives, how payouts arrive and how many entities the business trades through.
What each package publishes about its own stock features, and the setups that fit around it: Xero, Sage 50 and QuickBooks Online.
We design the flow into the ledger before the connector is chosen, so the month closes on numbers that already agree rather than numbers someone has argued into agreement. The connectors that carry Shopify into the ledger are set out on the Shopify and Xero page, and the stock systems on the stock control page.
The systems review starts there: which system holds stock truth, where the ledger takes its numbers from, and which of the four reconciliations above someone is already doing by hand.
Start the systems reviewTell us what you need
What the systems are doing now, and what you need them to do. We'll tell you whether it's a platform problem or something cheaper.