Your real margin lives in five systems at once. We join them, then a qualified accountant reads what they say together.
Book a free margin review Test one of your productsAn e-commerce accountant tracks profit per SKU after marketplace fees, advertising, shipping and returns — not just revenue. Grosvenor.Solutions, an accountancy practice in Bath serving online sellers across the UK, connects your marketplaces, ad accounts, inventory system and payment processors to your Xero, QuickBooks or Sage accounts, rebuilds that picture nightly, and reports true profit per product and per channel. From £200 a month plus VAT.
Amazon collects the gross, deducts its fees, and pays you the difference days later. Your bank feed sees only that deposit — so revenue is understated, fees are invisible, and VAT is calculated on the wrong number.
Fees invisible. VAT on the wrong base. Profit per product impossible.
Same deposit. £250 of trading activity that would otherwise never reach your accounts — and the gross figure HMRC already holds.
Amazon, eBay, Etsy and TikTok Shop must report your sales straight to HMRC.
HMRC Digital Platform Reporting RulesSole traders and landlords pulled into MTD for Income Tax in the first tranche.
HMRC estimate, 2026Where the MTD threshold lands by April 2028. It is turnover, not profit.
GOV.UK, Spring Statement 2025How long HMRC keeps postponed import VAT statements before deleting them for good.
GOV.UK, Customs Declaration ServiceBooks built from net deposits do not match what HMRC holds. That is no longer a tidiness question.
Your business already produces all of this information. It is just sitting in separate places that were never built to talk to each other. We plug them together and read them as one.
Needs unit cost from stock, fees from the marketplace and advertising from the ad platform — combined per SKU.
Big companies sorted this out years ago. Not by hiring better accountants — by paying to plumb all their systems together, so one question could reach across the lot. It cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, which is why nobody your size ever got it.
We built that plumbing once and share it across every client. That is the whole reason we can tell you which product loses money, and your current accountant cannot.
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Marketplaces charge their fee on the full price the buyer pays, VAT included, while only the net amount is ever your revenue. Most calculators miss that. Change the numbers below and watch the third figure — the ROAS you need just to stand still.
| Channel | Fees & fulfilment | Contribution | Margin | Break-even ROAS |
|---|
Amazon UK referral 6–17% by category, 15% shown; FBA from £2.50 a unit. The £25 monthly Professional plan is excluded, being a fixed cost rather than a unit cost. eBay UK final value fee 3–15%, 13.25% in most categories, plus £0.30 an order. Etsy £0.20 listing, 6.5% transaction, plus 4% and £0.20 payment processing. Your own store no transaction fee on Shopify Payments; card processing 2.4% plus £0.25.
Returns are costed as the refunded net revenue plus the fulfilment fee plus £1.50 of handling, assuming the unit is resold; if yours are written off the true cost is higher. Break-even ROAS is measured against the revenue your ad platform reports, which is the VAT-inclusive price. POAS is contribution divided by ad spend, so 1.00 is exactly break-even on the advertised unit.
Published UK rates as at 2026; your category and plan will differ, so change the referral figure to yours. This models one product on rate-card assumptions. Doing it across your whole catalogue on the fees actually invoiced to you is the job we do.
Illustrative model using published fee rates. Not a client result.
ROAS measures revenue against ad spend. Revenue is not yours — a large part of it belongs to Amazon, to your supplier and to HMRC. POAS measures what is actually left against what you spent to get it. Both products below report a ROAS of 4.0, so an agency optimising to ROAS would treat them the same.
POAS needs a true contribution margin for every individual product: the actual referral fee for its category, the actual FBA band for its dimensions, its own return rate, its own landed cost after that container’s freight and duty. That means marketplace settlement data and the ledger joined at product level, and agreeing with each other.
Here is the part nobody says out loud. Apply one blended margin across the catalogue and POAS tells you nothing ROAS did not. It becomes ROAS multiplied by a constant, so the ranking is identical. POAS only earns its keep when the margin is worked out per product — which is the whole job, and the reason it usually is not done.
We reviewed the UK market again in 2026 before writing this. Several things we used to claim here are now standard — the settlement tools most practices run, A2X and Link My Books, handle month-end cut-off and multi-currency properly, so we have stopped presenting those as ours. These four are what we can provide that others still find difficult, and each card says why it is difficult.
Channel data and the books rarely agree to the penny. Before an answer reaches you it is reconciled against the financial records, and when it will not tie, Chloe says so rather than guessing. Fifteen reconciliations, reported in four honest states.
“I cannot give you a reliable margin figure. Your March Amazon settlement has not synced and February purchase invoices are not posted. Both flagged for your accountant.”
Why that is difficultThe settlement tools reconcile a payout to a bank deposit, which is a different job. Nothing in the standard toolchain checks whether an answer is safe to give before it is given, because that needs the channel data and the ledger compared at the moment of asking.
Plenty of firms will now report margin per SKU. Very few will tell you the figure that actually governs an advertising decision: the return a particular product must achieve before promoting it makes you any money.
break-even ROAS = price ÷ contribution per unit
Why that is difficultIt needs a true contribution margin for every individual product — its own category fee, its own fulfilment band, its own return rate, its own landed cost after freight and duty — joined to the ad platform’s data. Apply one blended margin instead and POAS becomes ROAS multiplied by a constant, mathematically identical and therefore worthless. It has to be per product or not at all.
HMRC publishes your postponed import VAT statement around the eighth working day of the month and keeps it available for six months only. After that it is archived, and HMRC will not guarantee it can be reissued — while you remain obliged to hold VAT records for six years.
We collect them every month, read them in HMRC’s own layout, match each import to its customs entry number so the same one cannot be claimed twice, and carry a ready-to-reclaim figure into your VAT cycle.
Why that is difficultThe marketplace settlement tools do not touch HMRC’s Customs Declaration Service at all — it sits outside the channel-to-ledger pipeline. Collecting, reading and matching those statements is manual drudgery on a six-month clock, which is exactly why it gets skipped.
Stock that has stopped moving is money you have already spent and cannot use. We report dead stock as a figure in pounds and as a share of your total stock value, with the ageing behind it — then tie that valuation back to what the balance sheet says it is worth.
For most sellers it is the largest sum in the business nobody is looking at, and it competes directly with the stock you actually need to reorder.
Why that is difficultIt needs stock levels joined to landed cost and agreeing with the ledger’s own valuation. In most monthly packs “inventory analysis” means a stock list; turning it into a cash figure you can act on means reconciling two systems that disagree by default.
And one thing we deliberately do not do. Your books stay in your own Xero, QuickBooks or Sage, in your name. If you leave, you keep your books, your history and your software. There is nothing to extract and no minimum term. We would rather earn the next month than rely on it being hard to go.
Channel data misleads. Amazon reports a sale at order date, your books record it at settlement. eBay nets fees off the payout where Xero shows them gross. A refund lands in a different month entirely. Any one of those turns a confident answer into a wrong one.
So before any figure drawn from channel data reaches you, it is reconciled to the financial records — the ledger is the authority, always. Fifteen reconciliations run across sales, payouts, fees, advertising, stock, payroll and import VAT. When the numbers do not tie, the answer says so, inside the answer.
A reconciliation that cannot tell a bookkeeping backlog from a genuine break is worse than none — it cries wolf every month until you stop reading it. Those four states are reported separately for exactly that reason.
If you import stock you cannot reclaim import VAT on the strength of your freight agent’s invoice. HMRC wants the C79 certificate, or the postponed VAT statement if you are using postponed accounting. Both arrive monthly as PDFs, in a layout designed for filing rather than reading.
C79 certificates and postponed VAT statements are read in their actual HMRC layout — reference, period, each entry, port, customs entry number and VAT amount.
Every import entry is matched to the certificate covering it. The customs entry number is unique, so the same import cannot be claimed twice — the commonest way an import VAT claim goes wrong.
What is evidenced and not yet claimed, kept separate from what is claimed and what is still waiting for its certificate. One number you can act on at VAT return time.
ready = evidenced by C79 − already reclaimed| Capability | The usual arrangement | With us |
|---|---|---|
| Settlement journals | A2X or Link My Books, £30–£230 a month, per channel, rising with volume. | Included. Every channel. Reviewed by an accountant before posting. |
| Receipt capture | Dext, £25–£50 a month by document volume. | Included. Line items, not just totals. |
| Cash flow forecasting | Float, £47–£159 a month. | Included. Thirteen weeks, rebuilt nightly. |
| Profit per SKU | A spreadsheet you maintain. Most tools stop at the marketplace boundary. | Included. Marketplace, advertising and stock read together. |
| Data quality checks | Discovered at year end, if at all. | Included. Every night, raised within a day. |
Other accountants tell you to buy A2X. We built the equivalent — and we read what it produces.
The specialist firms in this market are genuinely good at marketplace bookkeeping, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. The difference is not whether the reconciliation gets done. It is what happens afterwards.
Set on a matrix, not on what we think you will pay. The client who asks the hardest questions should not subsidise the one who does not.
Overseas VAT and GST registrations and fractional CFO work are quoted separately. Fees reviewed annually, never changed without notice.
Before any of the above works, everything has to be plugged in properly and your past figures tidied up and agreed. It is real work, it happens once, and we charge for it once.
Your accounting software, every sales channel, payment accounts, ad accounts and stock system, all switched on and feeding through.
Your past payouts rebuilt properly, so your starting figures agree with what the platforms and HMRC already have.
Each platform set up to record correctly, VAT handled right per channel, and your product costs loaded so margins work from day one.
We check everything, fix what we find, and only then give you a first report. We do not report on figures we have not checked.
| Tier | Total | Per month, first 3 months | What drives it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Foundation | £450 + VAT | £150 × 3 | 1–2 channels, one accounting system, up to 12 months of history. |
| Growth | £750 + VAT | £250 × 3 | Multiple channels, ads and stock connected, product costs loaded for SKU margin. |
| Command | £1,200 + VAT | £400 × 3 | Multi-channel and international, multiple currencies, import VAT history. |
Added to your first three invoices rather than charged up front, so you are not paying a big lump sum before you have seen anything.
Waived entirely for our first five e-commerce clients. We are a new firm and would rather earn a reputation than a margin on setup. The monthly fee is unchanged — the build is simply free, and it is the part sellers find hardest to get done properly anywhere.
It is not an investigation. It is an invitation to correct the position before one starts, and that window is worth using. We establish when trading began, rebuild gross sales from settlement data, and reply with records that agree to what the platform reported.
Talk to us before you replyIf you sell on a marketplace, yes. Marketplaces pay net of fees, so a general practice accountant working from bank deposits will understate your revenue and misstate your VAT. Since January 2024 platforms report gross sales directly to HMRC, so books built on net deposits no longer agree with what HMRC holds.
Published UK e-commerce fee schedules in 2026 put multi-channel bookkeeping at £195 to £775 a month and Amazon FBA accounting at £250 to £1,000 a month. Grosvenor.Solutions charges from £200, £500 or £800 a month plus VAT depending on channels and volume, with settlement journals, receipt capture and cash flow forecasting included rather than billed separately.
It covers the setup: plugging every system together, tidying and agreeing your past figures, setting up your accounts so each platform is recorded correctly, and running a full check on your data before we report anything. It is £450, £750 or £1,200 plus VAT depending on tier, added to your first three monthly invoices rather than charged up front. It is currently waived for our first five e-commerce clients.
Recording only the net amount a marketplace deposits into your bank. It understates revenue, hides every fee, and produces a VAT figure calculated against the wrong base. Correct treatment records gross revenue, VAT and each fee category separately, which is what a settlement journal does.
Yes. We create balanced double-entry journals from your marketplace settlements and push them to Xero or QuickBooks, included in the monthly fee with no per-channel charge. The difference from a standalone tool is that a qualified accountant reviews each journal before it is posted.
Amazon, Shopify, eBay, Etsy and TikTok Shop for sales; Stripe and PayPal for payments; Linnworks, Cin7, Veeqo and Unleashed for inventory; Google Ads, Meta Ads and Amazon PPC for advertising. On the accounting side, Xero, QuickBooks and Sage.
Yes. Most e-commerce specialists work with Xero only and a few add QuickBooks, so you do not have to migrate to work with us. One limitation worth knowing: Sage does not expose analysis types through its API, so Sage clients get everything except channel-level profit and loss built from tracking categories.
Nothing. Your books live in your own Xero, QuickBooks or Sage account in your name, and everything we build sits alongside it rather than instead of it. You keep your software, your history and your data with no extraction and no rebuild. There is no minimum term.
No, and the design point is the opposite. Every answer carries a confidence rating derived from nightly data quality checks. Where the data will not support a reliable answer, Chloe-AI declines to give one and explains what is missing. Answers come from fixed, pre-written financial calculations rather than the model inventing a query, and every calculation was designed and checked by a qualified accountant.
Every figure is stored in sterling with the original currency and the exchange rate applied both preserved against it. That matters because a mishandled conversion can overstate revenue substantially and makes margin analysis meaningless.
It applies to sole traders and landlords, not limited companies. From 6 April 2026 it is mandatory where qualifying income exceeds £50,000, falling to £30,000 in April 2027 and £20,000 in April 2028. Qualifying income means turnover, not profit, so a seller with high revenue and thin margins can be caught early.
Yes. We review the position, establish when trading began, reconstruct gross sales from settlement data, and prepare a response with records that agree to what the platform reported. It is worth taking advice before replying.
More than most realise, because HMRC keeps postponed VAT statements on the Customs Declaration Service for six months only before deleting them. Sellers who do not download them monthly lose the evidence needed to reclaim, and the amount is unrecoverable once the statement is gone.
Grosvenor.Solutions is the trading name of Imperial Consulting Limited, registered in England and Wales, number 8635449. We hold professional indemnity insurance and have applied for HMRC supervision under the Money Laundering Regulations. HMRC permits accountancy service providers to trade while an application is processed.
Most clients are fully onboarded within two weeks. We plug everything in, tidy up and agree your past figures, check the data, and only then start reporting — because showing you numbers we have not checked helps nobody.
A free 30-minute review of your channels, fees and margins — and a straight answer on what your current setup is not showing you.
Book a free margin reviewOla Fashipe, founder of Grosvenor.Solutions, 3 Grosvenor Park, Bath, Somerset BA1 6BL. ACCA-qualified, MBA (Warwick Business School), 25 years in enterprise finance at IBM, Shell, BP, Deutsche Bank, GE, KPMG, Lloyds and Deliveroo.