We have several eCommerce sites and we’re looking for a way to automate things. My old system involved me re-typing each sale into my accounting software so when I saw that Woocommerce had a XERO extension I loaded up a test trial of Xero and grabbed the XERO extension from your site. I had looked at trying to integrate our old accounting package but quotes were coming in at well over $1000 to do this so the Xero extension at only $79 for a 5 site licence felt very reasonable and I am loving cloud based accounting!
I work with the Minimum viable product (MVP) principles in mind and like to try many small niche eCommerce websites, I don’t want to have to outlay full accounting setups for each niche website so I needed to be able to feed each site into the one XERO account initially. Once a business has proved it’s worth and is earning enough money to support itself it can then be upgraded to a Ltd Company and be given it’s own dedicated accounting setup To test a business/product idea I run them under my personal trading/as account package. Cheap, quick, easy!
I need to be able to see at a glance how much each website is earning so I assign each website an account number in XERO. For my example I have 2 websites Wishlantern and Modowest as shown below:
I then jump on over to my Niche Websites and setup XERO, I won’t go into the XERO setup as the existing tutorial on this site is easy to follow but note that the Sales Account field should reflect the sales account you setup in XERO above. (201 for Modowest, 200 for Wishlantern)
This will feed sales from each site into their respective XERO account allowing you to see at a glance each individual websites performance:
Another plugin I use is the Sequential Order Numbers Pro this extends the numbering system and allows me to add a letter/code to the beginning of each invoice. This stops the chance of their ever being invoice numbering conflicts from 2 sites sending the same invoice number to XERO. In my example I have added a M- to the Modowest sales and a W- to the Wishlantern sales:
Another benefit of using this plugin is that when reviewing paid & unpaid invoices in XERO I can at a glance see which site has made the most sales by looking at the letter prefixing the invoice number.
Conclusion
Having my orders fed into XERO automatically has been awesome, I can at a glance, in one centralised place, see how each of my niche websites are performing and get a total summary of total income being generated across all sites. It helps me control my finances and set business goals. I think this setup will suit people that have a range of small commerce websites. It really does minimise the boring stuff (data entry etc) and allows you to focus on growing your business, as well as working on your next business idea. If this tutorial helps you, or you do things a different way, i’d love to hear from you. I use the SwipeHQpayment gateway which is far cheaper than Paypal and doesn’t have a transaction fee per order.
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I started with Paypal and am finding SwipeHQ an improvement.
A lot of my customers get confused/put off with paypal thinking they will need to create an account. (a lot of kiwi’s are unaware of guest checkout) so the SwipeHQ process is much smoother.
From a fee’s perspective it’s great, no transaction fee (v’s paypals 45c) and lower processing fee’s.
I’ve had a few teething issues with SwipeHQ including my debut c/card transaction being double billed. Lucky it was my c/card testing it out but SwipeHQ never worked out what happened. Last week the credit card fields on their payment page had vanished, not good and i only found out when i received a call from a frustrated customer. SwipeHQ explained the issue as a bug in their system and had it fixed in 30mins but it is a worry and i wonder how many customers it prevented completing a transaction.