This is the same mess in one store or in several. A second location does not create a new kind of arithmetic.
Whether you have one door or a handful, the shelf is full of things you own until a customer takes them. Sales tax you collected is not sales. It is money you are holding for a state. A card payout, a Shopify payout, or a marketplace payout is smaller than the receipt the customer saw, because a fee came out, and sometimes the marketplace already kept the tax. If you record the payout as sales, you shrink revenue, hide the fee, and either pay tax you do not owe or fail to pay tax you collected. One store and a multi-door retailer make this mistake the same way. The only extra fact with more than one door is that each door still needs its own sales and its own shelf, or the company total is a blur.
Inventory is an asset. Cost of goods is what left the shelf because it sold, was damaged, or was stolen. Purchases restock the asset. If you expense the vendor bill on the day you pay it, a big buy looks like a terrible month and the month you sell those units looks like you had no cost at all. Beginning inventory, plus purchases, minus what is still on the shelf, is what the period used. A count at the period boundary, even a count of the expensive lines plus a reasonable method for the rest, is what makes that sentence true.
Gift cards are the mirror image. The customer paid you, and you owe them goods later. That cash is a liability until they redeem the card. It is not this week's sales. When they redeem it, the sale happens then, and the liability goes down. If you recorded the sale on the day they bought the card and again on the day they used it, you sold the same thing twice.
Tax you add at the register is not your revenue. It sits as a liability until you remit it. Recording it inside sales inflates the month and then makes the remittance look like an expense, so you pay the state and punish the profit and loss a second time. Pull tax out of sales on every channel that collects it.
Channels are not copies of each other. In your own store, you usually collect the tax and remit it. On some marketplaces, the marketplace collects and remits, and the payout you receive does not include that tax. On others, the tax is still yours to remit. This page will not tell you which states do which. Write it down, channel by channel, from the channel's own report: who collected the tax, and whether it is in your payout. Then the books follow that note. Guessing, or using one rule for every channel, is how you remit tax that was already remitted, or skip tax that is sitting in your account.
Square, Shopify, and the card batch deposit sales minus fees, and sometimes minus refunds. Enter the gross sale, enter the fee, enter the refund in the period it belongs to, and let the deposit prove the net. If a marketplace also deducted its commission, that commission is a cost of the sale, not a reduction you forget. A refund after the period closed is still a refund. Parking it in the next period's sales as a quiet negative, with no label, makes both periods wrong.
Shrink and damage need a name. If the count is short, the difference is shrink, theft, or a receiving error. It is a cost. It is not a reason to edit the sales number until the margin 'looks normal.' A normal-looking margin that was forced there will not warn you the next time a case walks out the back door.
If you have two stores, each store needs its own sales, its own tax, and its own shelf. A shared bank account is fine. A shared undifferentiated income account is how one store carries the other without anyone admitting it. Transfers of stock between doors are not sales. They are the shelf moving. Recording a transfer as a sale, or as a purchase, invents revenue and invents cost in the same breath.
What you send is the channel reports, the bank deposits, a shelf count if you have one, and the last sales-tax filing so the liability has a starting point. The first product is a period where gross sales, tax, fees, and the deposit all agree, and the shelf is not pretending to be an expense on delivery day. A single shop uses that same product. You do not need a second method because you have a second address.
No. Enter the sales the channel report shows, enter the fees and refunds, and let the payout match what landed in the bank. The payout is the net cash, not the sale.
No. It is money you collected for a tax authority, unless that channel already remitted it and never put it in your payout. Either way it is not your sales. The channel report is what tells you which of those two you are in.
Yes. One shelf, one register, and one payout have the same three-way problem. More doors only means you repeat it per door instead of blending the doors together.
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