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The 27-Point Ecommerce Money Leak Checklist

The exact checks our accountants run in week one on every new client’s books. Print it, work through it with your own file open, and total up what you find. Most sellers find their first leak in section one.

1. Marketplace money they owe you

Amazon and Walmart lose, damage and mis-handle inventory constantly. Reimbursement is your money; unclaimed, it expires.

Pull the FBA inventory adjustments report: any lost or damaged units without a matching reimbursement in the last 18 months?
Check reimbursements against your own claim log: were any auto-reimbursed at below your actual cost?
Refunded orders where the buyer never returned the item past the 45-day window: was the refund reversed?
Removal orders: did every removed unit actually arrive back?
Chargebacks and A-to-Z claims: were any debited twice, once by the claim and once by a refund?

2. Fee creep

Platforms change fee schedules quietly. Sellers who never audit fees fund those changes.

Spot-check 10 SKUs: does the referral fee % Amazon charged match the published rate for that category?
FBA fees: measure and re-verify the size tier of your 5 highest-volume SKUs (mis-measurement is common and refundable)
Storage fees: any SKU quietly crossing into long-term storage that should be removed or repriced?
Are you paying for marketplace subscriptions, tools or software seats nobody uses anymore?
Payment processing: is your blended rate on direct channels above 3%? That's negotiable.

3. COGS and inventory truth

The most expensive section. COGS errors silently misprice every product you sell.

Is inventory purchased this quarter sitting in COGS instead of on the balance sheet?
Do your COGS include inbound freight and duties (landed cost), or just the supplier invoice?
Tariffs paid in 2025-2026: expensed when paid, or capitalized into inventory the way lenders and buyers expect?
Pick your best-selling SKU: can you state its true landed cost within 5%? Now check what the books say.
Shrinkage: when did you last reconcile system inventory to a physical or FBA count?

4. Revenue and settlement accuracy

If deposits are booked as revenue, everything downstream is fiction, including your tax return.

Does gross revenue in your books tie to your 1099-K within rounding distance? (The IRS checks this by computer.)
Are refunds shown separately from sales, or netted invisibly?
Is sales tax collected sitting in a liability account, or inflating your revenue?
Gift cards sold but not redeemed: revenue (wrong) or liability (right)?
Do the last 3 marketplace settlements reconcile to the penny against payouts received?

5. Sales tax and compliance leaks

Both directions leak: exposure you don't know about, and tax you're paying that you don't owe.

Are you registered anywhere marketplace facilitator laws already cover, filing returns you may not need?
Direct-channel (Shopify) sales: any state where you've crossed economic nexus without registering?
Foreign-owned LLC: was Form 5472 filed every year? (Penalty: $25,000 per missed year.)
Are quarterly estimated taxes based on real profit, or last year's guess?

6. Cash flow blind spots

Profitable sellers die of cash flow. These three checks are the early-warning system.

Reserves: how much of 'your' money is Amazon currently holding, and is it in your cash forecast?
Can you state contribution margin per channel within 60 seconds? If not, which channel is quietly unprofitable?
Inventory buys for Q4: funded from margin, or from money that was meant for taxes?

Found something? That's the point.

Every item on this list is a symptom of the same root cause: books built by generalists. Here’s the fastest fix, and it costs you nothing to see it:

The Free Ecommerce Books Teardown

✓ We rebuild your most recent month of books properly ($1,250 value)
✓ A 10-minute recorded video walking through every leak we find, with dollar figures ($500 value)
✓ Your 27-point score, done by us instead of you
✓ You keep all of it, even if we never speak again

No card. No contract. If we don’t find money or errors worth multiples of our fee, you’ll know your books are genuinely clean, which is worth knowing before a lender or buyer checks.

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We'll do last month's books free, and show you what your bookkeeper missed

The free Ecommerce Books Audit: connect read-only access and within 3 business days you get a clean month of books plus a 10-minute recorded teardown of every margin leak, COGS error and sales-tax risk we found. Keep it all, even if you never hire us.

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