Chart of Accounts
The chart of accounts is the organized list of every account your transactions post to: revenue accounts, cost accounts, assets, liabilities and equity. It's the skeleton of your books. A default QuickBooks chart gives you one Sales account and one lump of expenses; an ecommerce chart breaks revenue and fees out by channel, structures COGS properly, and puts inventory, reserves and sales tax liability where a reader can find them.
The chart decides what questions your books can answer. With one Sales line, "which channel actually makes money?" is unanswerable. With channel-level accounts, it takes one glance: Amazon revenue $85,000 against $19,000 of Amazon fees, Shopify revenue $40,000 against $5,200 of processing and app costs. We've onboarded sellers who discovered their "best" channel netted 12% while the neglected one netted 28%, purely because the chart finally separated them.
Getting it right early is cheap; restructuring 18 months of miscoded history is not. We published our full template, with the reasoning behind each account, in the ecommerce chart of accounts guide, and setting it up correctly inside your own file is part of QuickBooks for ecommerce onboarding.
Where this shows up in our work
This isn’t textbook material for us; it’s the day-to-day of keeping seller books right. See how we handle it in practice:
QuickBooks for Ecommerce→