Bookkeeping for marketplace sellers on a Mac

By Kayabyte · Last updated 29 October 2026

If you sell on Etsy, eBay, Amazon or your own Shopify store, money reaches you through several balances, each with its own fees and payout schedule. Good books keep sales, costs and money movement apart. This guide is a routine that works with a spreadsheet and gets faster with a tool. We make one, and say where.

1. The routine

Once a month (or each payout), download the report from each platform.
Give every row a category: sales, shipping charged, sales tax collected, refunds, fees, advertising, shipping labels, adjustments, and money movement.
Check that the categories reproduce the report’s own totals or balance.
Export a summary and a journal for your accounting software, or a worksheet for your tax return.
Keep the original files with the exports.

2. Where to find each report

Menu names change, so use these as a guide:

Etsy: Shop Manager, Finances, Monthly statements. See Etsy statement CSV to Schedule C.
eBay: Seller Hub, Payments, Reports, Transactions. See eBay transaction report.
Amazon: Payments, All Statements, Flat File V2. See Amazon settlement report.
Shopify: Settings, Payments, View payouts, View transactions, Export. See Shopify payouts.
PayPal: Reports, Activity download, Balance affecting. See PayPal activity CSV.
Stripe: Reports, Balance or Payout reconciliation. See Stripe payouts.

3. Mistakes to avoid

Counting the payout as income as well as the sales that made it.
Counting sales tax or VAT collected by the marketplace as revenue.
Booking fees when the deposit arrives instead of when they were charged.
Leaving refunds and chargebacks inside sales.
Mixing currencies without a record of the conversion.

4. A clearing account

Give each platform a clearing account in your books. Sales and fees go through it, and only the payout leaves it for the bank. When the clearing account does not return to the platform’s balance, something is missing.

5. Where Balanced helps

Balanced is a Mac app that reads these reports on your Mac, categorises every row by rules (not AI), checks them against their own totals and balances, and exports for your accountant: a categorised CSV or Excel, a category summary, a suggested Schedule C worksheet, a Xero manual journal, QuickBooks Online journal entries, Beancount or Ledger. Categories you change are remembered. It also reads your supplier invoices and receipts (see invoice PDF to Excel) and bank statements, in the same app and the same subscription.

Honest limits: report layouts change, so check the preview and the category totals; Balanced does not log in to your account or fetch anything, you download the file yourself; the Schedule C worksheet is a suggested grouping, not tax advice, so check it with your tax professional or accountant.

Download Balanced and try it free: the free version reads and checks everything and exports the first 10 lines per file, so you can test your own report before paying. Pro is USD 59 per year or USD 7.99 per month, for up to 3 Macs. See pricing and the help page. macOS 14 or later.