eBay Bookkeeping Without Xero or QuickBooks

If you’re running a small eBay business — anything from a few hundred pounds a month to a chunky side income — you probably don’t need a £20-a-month accounting platform yet. A simple spreadsheet workflow gets you Self Assessment-ready, gives you the answers your accountant needs, and costs nothing.

This guide is the no-nonsense version: what you actually have to track, how the spreadsheet looks, when to update it, and at what point it stops being enough and you should bite the bullet on Xero or QuickBooks.

What you actually need to track

For an eBay seller without VAT, the minimum that keeps HMRC happy and your Self Assessment correct is five things:

1. Sales — every transaction, with date and gross amount. eBay handles this for you; you just need the export.
2. eBay fees — final value, regulatory operating, promoted listings, international. Also exportable directly. See the fees explained guide for what each one is.
3. Payouts — what landed in your bank. Used to reconcile sales-minus-fees against actual deposits. See the payouts guide.
4. Cost of goods sold — what you paid for the stock, tied to the items you actually sold during the tax year. The eBay side can’t give you this; it lives in your supplier invoices, car-boot notes, or stock receipts.
5. Other expenses — postage outside eBay’s label system, packaging materials, mileage, business-use proportion of home internet/phone.

That’s it. Everything else is either derived from these (gross profit, net profit) or out of scope for a typical sole-trader eBay business.

The five-tab spreadsheet

Open a fresh Google Sheet or Excel workbook and create five tabs:

Tab 1 — Sales

Paste the clearpence transactions CSV here, monthly. Columns:

• Date (DD/MM/YYYY)
• Order ID
• Item title
• SKU
• Gross amount (£)
• Fee amount (£)
• Net amount (£) — auto-calc Gross minus Fee

At the bottom, a SUM row for Gross and Net. That’s your turnover and your eBay-side net income for the tax year so far.

Tab 2 — Fees

Paste the clearpence fees CSV. Columns:

• Date
• Fee type (Final Value / Regulatory / Promoted / International / etc.)
• Amount
• Linked transaction or payout ID

SUM at the bottom. Add a small breakdown by fee type using SUMIF — it’s useful for the accountant view and for understanding where your fee load is going.

Tab 3 — Payouts

Paste the clearpence payouts CSV. Columns:

• Payout date
• Payout amount
• Bank reference
• Status
• Bank-statement match — manually tick once you’ve found it in your bank statement

This is the reconciliation tab. Run through your business bank statement once a month; every eBay deposit should match a payout row. Any deposit without a matching payout, or any payout without a matching deposit, gets investigated.

Tab 4 — Stock / cost of goods

Whenever you buy stock, add a row. Columns:

• Date purchased
• Supplier / source (eBay seller name, car boot, charity shop, wholesale supplier)
• Description
• SKU you assign it (matches the SKU on your eBay listing)
• Cost
• Status (in stock / sold / written off)

At year end, your cost of goods sold is the sum of costs for items where status = sold during the tax year. Items still in stock at 5 April carry over (you don’t deduct them this year; you deduct them in the year they sell).

Tab 5 — Other expenses

Everything that isn’t eBay fees or stock. Columns:

• Date
• Category (postage / packaging / mileage / home office / subscriptions)
• Description
• Amount
• Receipt reference (file name, photo path)

Take a photo of physical receipts as you go and stick them in a dated folder on your phone or cloud drive. The receipt reference column just records where the proof lives.

The monthly routine (15 minutes)

1. Open the extension popup. Set the date range to Last month.
2. Export the three CSVs: Orders/Transactions, Payouts, Fees.
3. Paste each into the matching tab below the existing data.
4. Open your business bank statement for the same month. Tick off each eBay deposit against the Payouts tab.
5. Add any non-eBay expenses to Tab 5 from your receipts folder.

Done. Once a month, fifteen minutes, no missed transactions, and you’re Self Assessment-ready before the January panic.

The year-end routine (1 hour)

Sometime in the first week of April:

1. Run a final export covering 6 April → 5 April using the UK Tax Year preset. Confirms nothing was missed.
2. Tally the totals:
   • Turnover = SUM of Gross on the Sales tab
   • eBay fees = SUM on the Fees tab
   • Cost of goods sold = SUM of cost on Stock tab where status = sold during the year
   • Other expenses = SUM on Tab 5
   • Net profit = Turnover − Fees − COGS − Other expenses
3. Stock-take: count items still in your possession at 5 April. Match against Stock tab “in stock” rows. Discrepancies usually mean a forgotten sale or a written-off item — fix those.
4. Send the spreadsheet plus the original CSVs to your accountant, or use the totals to fill in your own SA103S Self Assessment page. See the Self Assessment guide for the form-filling side.

When this stops being enough

Spreadsheet bookkeeping has a ceiling. Switch to Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent or similar when one of these is true:

• You’re VAT registered. Quarterly MTD submissions are much easier with proper software. You can keep using a spreadsheet plus bridging software, but most people find paying £15/month easier than maintaining the bridge.
• You’ve got multiple income streams. eBay plus a physical shop plus Etsy plus consulting — once you’re combining three or more streams, a real accounting platform pays for itself in time saved.
• Turnover is over about £50k. The volume of transactions makes manual reconciliation tedious. Bank feeds and rule-based categorisation start to matter.
• You’re a limited company. The reporting obligations are heavier than a sole trader’s — Companies House filings, corporation tax, payroll if you take a salary. Software is generally worth it.
• You’re paying an accountant £400+ a year. They’ll usually rebate you some of that if you’re on Xero, because their end is much faster.

For a sole trader doing under £50k of eBay sales, the spreadsheet approach plus clearpence is genuinely fine. Don’t pay for software you don’t need.

Making Tax Digital — coming soon-ish

From April 2026, Making Tax Digital for Income Tax applies to self-employed people and landlords with qualifying income above £50,000. From April 2027, the threshold drops to £30,000. From April 2028, it’s expected to drop to £20,000. Once you’re in scope you have to:

• Use MTD-compatible software (or bridging software for spreadsheets).
• Send HMRC quarterly updates of income and expenses.
• Submit a final declaration at year end.

Spreadsheets can still work — HMRC has explicitly said they’re fine with bridging software — but the friction goes up. If you’re close to the threshold, this is the point at which a £15/month accounting platform stops feeling extravagant. Check gov.uk MTD guidance for current dates and thresholds — these have shifted before and may shift again.

FAQs

clearpence is an independent tool and is not affiliated with eBay Inc. eBay is a registered trademark of its owner. This guide is general information about bookkeeping for small eBay businesses, not tax or accounting advice — consult an accountant for your specific situation. HMRC rules and thresholds change.