Some eBay sellers might make purchases on eBay using their seller balance. In this article we'll outline how Link My books handles those and the actions you need to take to reconcile them.
How does Link My books account for purchases made with eBay seller balance?
Link My Books allocates all purchases paid via a seller balance to the eBay Purchases account, which by default is LMB49: eBay Purchases and is a current liability type account.
How do I find out what an eBay purchase relates to?
Important: Link My Books only receives the total purchase amount from eBay's payout data. eBay does not include any detail about what was actually purchased (e.g. inventory, postage labels, packaging, etc.), so we cannot tell you from our side what each purchase relates to.
To identify what each purchase was for, you'll need to check the transaction history directly in eBay:
Log in to eBay Seller Hub
Go to Payments > All transactions
Filter by the relevant date range to find the purchase transactions
Match the amounts and dates against what is showing in Xero or QuickBooks under the eBay Purchases account (LMB49)
This will let you trace each purchase back to a specific eBay order or expense, so you know which account to allocate it to when creating your net-off entry.
How should I reconcile these purchases?
Each time you make a purchase using your eBay balance you should create an entry in your accounting system to account for that purchase.
However this won't be a normal bill with an amount to pay, you'll need to net off the bill to the eBay Purchases account like this:
On line 1 we enter the purchase amount as a negative amount and allocate it to the eBay Purchases account.
On line 2 we enter the purchase amount as a positive amount and allocate it to the account the purchase relates to. In our example here we bought some inventory, so we choose the inventory account.
If you have any questions about this article or feedback on how we could make it better please reach out to the support team via the blue chat icon on the bottom right of the page or via email to [email protected].