Insights
Accounting: Your Ledger and the Export for Your Accountant
What the Accounting totals count, how refunds and costs are treated, and how to export the ledger for a date range as a CSV for your accountant.
Overview
Finance → Accounting shows your store's money for a date range: Revenue, Expenses, Profit and Invoices scanned, a revenue-against-expenses chart, and the Ledger, the list of every money movement BestWebby recorded for your store. Accounting is part of the Scale plan and above. The owner, admins and anyone with the accountant role can open it.
Pick the range with the two dates in the Ledger section. It starts at the last 30 days.
What the totals count
Every ledger entry has a type, and the type decides where it counts:
| Category | Ledger types | Where it counts |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | POS sale, order payment, subscription | Adds to Revenue |
| Refund | Refund | Comes off Revenue. Refunds are stored as negative amounts: money going back out |
| Cost | Ghost order cost, API cost | Adds to Expenses, by size, whatever sign it was stored with |
| Other | Every other type, for example scanned supplier invoices, chargebacks, gift cards issued and vendor payouts | Listed in the ledger and the export, not counted in the totals |
So Revenue is what you took after refunds, and Profit is Revenue minus Expenses.
The screen lists the newest 200 entries in the range; the totals always cover the whole range. To see every entry, export it.
Entries left over from the retired payroll screen are not real pay: their amounts were made up. They stay out of the ledger, the totals and the export. When a range has any, the Ledger says how many, and Show them lists them with their amounts struck through.
Exporting the ledger for your accountant
In the Ledger section, set the two dates and click Export CSV. You get ledger-<from>-to-<to>.csv with every entry in the range, not just the 200 on screen, oldest first.
- The range runs from the start of the first day to the end of the last day, in UTC, and can be up to two years long.
- Amounts are as recorded. Refunds are negative, so adding up the amount column nets them off. Each amount is given twice: in cents, and in dollars and cents.
- The category column is the same rule the totals use:
revenue,refund,costorother. Revenue rows plus refund rows give revenue after refunds; cost rows, added by size, give expenses;otherrows are in neither. - Legacy payroll entries are left out, as they are on screen.
- Up to 100,000 entries go in one file. If the range holds more, you are told the file is partial and how many entries it has; export a shorter range for the rest.
- Spreadsheet-safe. A cell that starts with a character a spreadsheet would treat as a formula is written as text. Negative amounts stay numbers.
The columns:
| Column | What it holds |
|---|---|
date | When the entry was recorded, in UTC |
type | The ledger type, for example order_payment, pos_sale or refund |
category | revenue, refund, cost or other (see above) |
amount_cents | The amount in cents; negative for a refund |
amount | The same amount in dollars and cents |
currency | The currency of the entry |
reference_type, reference_id | What the entry belongs to, for example an order and its id |
description | The description shown in the ledger |
entry_id | The ledger entry's own id |
Only people who can open Accounting can export it, and each export is recorded in Settings → Audit log.
Refunds in the order export
A refund never changes an order's total: it is a ledger entry against the order. The order export (Export on the Orders list) therefore has a last column, refunded_cents, with how much of each order has been refunded, as a positive number of cents. See Orders and shipping.