Announcing COGS Reconciliation, Automated Gateway Fees, New Automation Options & More

We're excited to announce the next iteration of the Reconcilely platform and with it, a large number of improvements and new features to help you automate yourself out of your Ecommerce accounting.

Today's release includes visual improvements to the app user interface, new onboarding for new customers, a variety of new automation settings and two highly-requested features that have been in progress for several weeks.

Here's an overview of the new features releasing for you today:

✨  A major UI update
💅  Totally new onboarding
🎛  Intelligent shipping tax rates
🗓  Due date override
🏷  Process orders by tag
💵  Custom cash clearing account
⚙️  COGS reconciliation (beta)
🧮  Auto-deduct gateway fees (beta)

In this article, we'll go over each new feature and describe the benefits they can create for you. All features released today are available to customers across all Reconcilely plans.

✨  A major UI update

Reconcilely’s brand and product interface launched with a simple, factor-over-form approach intended to help you get started quickly and with little configuration.

As the number of use cases for Reconcilely increased over time, so too did the number of feature settings and toggles. But the user interface suffered for it, and the impact was multiplied for new customers going through onboarding that was getting busier with every new released feature.

To avoid confusion, and further than that, to ensure that every feature has a logical place and a clear explanation of how it works and will affect your accounting flow, we’ve completely redesigned the settings page by establishing a new visual identity across the brand and product.

It’s worth starting off by mentioning that none of your configurations have changed in any sort of way. 

When new features are released, they are disabled by default. This redesign merely reorganizes where different toggles live and radically increases the amount of information for each option, so you can better understand and decide whether that feature is for you.

Now, as you hover your mouse over different feature settings, a help section on the right side of the screen will populate with useful information about how the feature works, as well as a Learn More link to a full article about the feature, if one exists.

The new settings interface features a sub-navigation for accessing different categories of features.

General Settings are options that have a large impact on your Reconcilely experience, such as turning on payout invoice consolidation on/off, sending individual invoices for each order on/off, and so on.

Invoice Preferences are settings that have to do with how invoices are created, under what context, and using which elements. This is the area for deciding how invoices should behave.

Invoice Preview is not yet available, but will provide you an easy way to preview an exported invoice for a payout or direct order based on the settings you’ve configured. Coming soon.

Inventory & COGS contains the settings for COGS Reconciliation, a new feature allowing you to choose custom ledger accounts for your inventory and COGS, and use Reconcilely to create matching invoices to account for cost of goods sold for each order. 

Gateway Fees is also a new setting which will allow you to automatically deduct and allocate incurred fees for different gateways to custom ledger accounts of your choosing. This is the section for entering your gateway fee structure.

Integrations is the home of all integrations for Reconcilely, present and future. From sales channels to accounting systems to app partners, this is where all integrations will live.

Our goal with the new settings is to simplify the process of setting up Reconcilely per your unique use case, and to give additional context to other features so you can be better prepared to enable/disable them as the need arises.

We’ll be redesigning the rest of the app as we release additional improvements, in preparation for opening Reconcilely to Quickbooks users in the near future.

💅  Totally new onboarding

While the preview onboarding experience was not bad in any respect, it could certainly be better.

Great onboarding experiences feel tailored and carefully designed to help you assimilate complex information quickly while also setting up the product to get the most benefit, with the least amount of time and friction in between.

In that regard, the new onboarding is a clearly defined 5-step process, labeled ahead of time and with a clear end-in-sight.

The onboarding also has received some user interface improvements to accommodate users on different screen sizes and to accelerate the time it takes to send the first invoices for merchants.

🎛  Intelligent shipping tax rates

If any of the products on the invoices you send are taxable, you may want to mark any collected shipping revenues as tax inclusive.

When enabled, this new option will mark any shipping you collect as being tax inclusive, as long as taxes are being collected somewhere on the invoice.

When disabled, the default behaviour is to mark shipping as tax exempt.

🗓  Due date override

This feature was requested a few times and we waited a few cycles to implement it because we weren’t sure if the override would be used across different dates, or just for a single one.

Based on what we found, it looks like the only use case for overriding a due date is in a B2B context where the net-30 arrangement typically translates to a due date on the 20th of the following month.

If you sell exclusively in a B2B context, you may find it useful to automatically set the due date of all Xero invoices to the 20th day of the month following the month an order was created.

Example: If a customer places an order on January 13, the due date on Xero will be February 20th.

If you have a need to set a different due date for your override, please contact us on Live Chat.

🏷  Process orders by tag

If your accounting tech stack includes several products, you may find it useful to have Reconcilely only send a specific kind of order over to Xero on your behalf. To simplify those use cases, you can now choose to create invoices for orders only if those orders are tagged with a specific tag.

This requires that you create tags on Shopify, as whatever is typed into the settings is the exact text Reconcilely will look for when new orders are detected on Shopify. 

💵  Custom cash clearing account

Reconciling cash deposits can get complicated really fast if all of the cash clearing activity you have is mixed along other transactions stuck in your suspense account.

To make things simpler, you can now select a custom cash clearing account out of your ledger’s list of current asset accounts to be used whenever cash is detected.

This way, you’ll be able to reconcile your cash deposits much more efficiently without having to wade through different irrelevant transactions.

To enable this, simply define the account you wish to map to cash transactions. 

Note that you can also force this off by marking this option as ‘Do Not Apply Cash Payments’ at which point they will be ignored altogether, rather than being added to the default Suspense account defined in your general mappings.

⚙️  COGS reconciliation (beta)

A long awaited feature, COGS aims to fill in the other half of the reconciliation process by sending invoices to Xero to account for the costs you incur when you sell your products.

Xero offers different ways to manage SKUs, inventory and reconciliation and Reconcilely can fit nicely into your workflow based on your use case.

How Xero will do its inventory management is first determined by how your item codes are created:

• Tracked inventory will defer inventory management to Xero. As you record sales against those products, the accounting software will automatically tick inventory up/down for you. While this solution has limitations, it often is good enough for many cases. If you sell tracked inventory, Xero will try to adjust your accounts for you.
• Untracked inventory is used if you do not plan to track inventory or prefer to use a third party inventory management software, as the product inventory will not be automatically adjusted by the accounting software (ie. Xero).

With COGS reconciliation, you can have Reconcilely make the inventory and COGS adjustments in custom ledger accounts of your choosing, while also sending an additional invoice for each order to account for the costs withdrawn from your accounts.

For example, if a customer purchases product ABC1 for $49.99 and ABC1 has a landed cost of $12.50...

You would want two invoices created in Xero:
- One invoice for $49.99 to account for the sales deposited into your accounts
- One invoice for $12.50 to account for the costs of goods sold withdrawn from your accounts

Here’s how it works:

First, in your settings, turn on Active Inventory Management.

Once enabled, you’ll be able to choose the expense and asset accounts to be adjusted for you.

The visual in the settings will help you understand how the workflow will change based on your selection. By default, Reconcilely is set to ‘Semi-Active,’ which only creates SKUs but does not make any inventory or COGS adjustments, leaving that process entirely to Xero.

Lastly and most importantly, you should visit the Costs section, which will pull all of your products, SKUs and cost values directly from Shopify.

To save some space, product variants are organized into product parents, and automatically contracted. You can expand any product to see its variants’ SKU and Cost, and make adjustments directly into the table.

The COGS feature works in conjunction with Shopify, reading the cost values of each product directly from there. Reconcile never saves any cost information to its databases, and only reads/writes to and from Shopify directly.

Consequently, adjusting costs in the Costs section will also update your costs on Shopify.

The accuracy of the COGS feature depends on every product having a cost value, otherwise it will be skipped. If you don’t have any cost values defined, you can use the ‘Upload Costs’ button to open a bulk upload tool we’ve created to help simplify cost backfilling and future updates.

First, download the CSV which will include all of your products as well as a ‘Cost’ column. Simply fill in the values into that column and re-upload the same file back to Reconcilely.

It may take some time, but the sheet will be processed and all costs from the sheet will be attached to their respective variants. It is worth noting that your cost update will also be reflected on Shopify, as that is where we pull information from.

From there, the goal is simply to maintain as close to 100% COGS accuracy as possible, and this can be accomplished by ensuring every product variant has a SKU and a cost value, such that costs can be properly calculated if and when an order containing variants with a cost is detected.

Some other details about the feature:

• Whenever you incur costs, Reconcilely will automatically debit and credit the COGS and inventory accounts you define in your COGS settings. The process will be reversed if a refund happens.
• Reconcilely will read your variant costs directly from Shopify. A handy tool has been created to allow you to adjust costs in bulk by downloading a CSV of missing costs that you can re-upload
• Your account will receive a 'COGS Accuracy' score representing the percentage of published variants that have a cost. If your COGS aren't 100% accurate, you'll know exactly why!
• As you add new products to Shopify, they will appear in this section so you can add in your landed cost one-by-one or in bulk.

We're excited to share this new feature with you! There's still some polish to be made, and any feedback you share is as usual a critical element of that process.

Since it’s in Beta, you may not see the COGS Reconciliation feature in Reconcilely. To get access, simply get in touch with us over Live Chat. Otherwise, we expect it to launch out of beta over the next few weeks as we see how it behaves.

🧮  Auto-deduct gateway fees (beta)

Gateway Fees is a new feature which will allow you to automatically deduct and allocate incurred fees for different gateways to custom ledger accounts of your choosing. 

In the settings, input the fee structure you’re currently using across different gateways. 

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Provided you’ve turned on Gateway Fee Deductions in your General Settings, Reconcilely will then use these values to automatically deduct fees from invoices and map them into the ledger accounts of your choice. 

Since it’s in Beta, you may not see the Gateway Fees feature in Reconcilely. To get access, simply get in touch with us over Live Chat. Otherwise, we expect it to launch out of beta over the next few weeks as we see how it behaves.

That’s it for this month. We’re excited to keep pushing forward with additional feature improvements. If you have any feature requests or enhancements in mind, please let us know in Live Chat or by email at team@reconcile.ly – our goal is to help you automate yourself out of your accounting as much as possible.

Until next time!

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