 But let's just give an overview of the sales side of the transaction. So now we're talking about the bucket of trying to record revenue and the other side of the sales transaction will ultimately be cash, right? So we're selling something on Shopify or Amazon at the point of sale. We're actually getting paid at that point in time. The problem is that there could be other things involved at that point of sale other than just cash collection such as fees. So how can we pull in this sales data into QuickBooks so we can get our financial statements? Well, this is where the variation comes in. How sophisticated do we want to be in doing this? There's pros and cons of different methods. So data can be pulled in with the bank feeds. So the easiest method is you just say, I'm just going to wait until it hits the bank. I'm not going to connect to Shopify or Amazon directly from QuickBooks online. I don't want all these integrations. It hits the bank. I'm going to record it as revenue when it hits the bank. That's easy. Nice. However, there's problems with that method and we'll get into more of the problems in the future. Obviously, one problem is that it doesn't add all the other breakouts that could happen before the money hits the bank. So you could have fees. You could have chargebacks and all these other kind of things that happen at the platform level and possibly at the level of the payment processor if you're using an Amazon or a Stripe. So by the time the money hits your bank account, you're grouping it as if, let's say you had $1,000 sale and by the time it hits your bank account, it's only $800. And you're recording $800 as revenue. What should have happened is you should have recorded $1,000 as revenue and then the fees and the chargebacks and whatever, all the other stuff is as an expense or a contra revenue account or something like that. So that's going to be the issue with it. So we'll get into some other different methods that we could use. So we could connect to the bank or we could try to connect directly to the platforms themselves like the Amazon platform and the Shopify platform. But then that adds another level of complication because now we have multiple things that were connected to the bank and then the platforms. And then we also have this kind of issue if there's third party processors like a Stripe or a PayPal. So we'll get into more of those options in future presentations. Now let's talk about the inventory bucket. This is the other one that we'll dive into more in future presentations. So we'll kind of try to break these out as we dig into them in more detail. The sales side of things, one of the different options for the sales side. I could use a simple cash-based method. I could try to connect to Amazon Shopify. I can use different kind of apps to do that, possibly QuickBooks itself. To do that, I can use like a manual type of method to try to pull the information in from Shopify in. So we'll talk more about that later. And then we'll get in to the inventory side of things. So usually we need to track inventory on an accrual basis. In other words, if you're dealing with inventory, the problem with inventory is that when I buy the inventory, I can't normally just expense it or I'm not supposed to. Right? If I buy the inventory, if I just write it off to cost of goods sold, that's not usually what's supposed to happen because you're supposed to put it on the books as an asset. And then when you sell the asset, you're going to move it from inventory to the expense account of cost of goods sold. The problem with that from our easy method is that we're usually using the cash-based method to make it easy. Meaning I would like to record the inventory as an expense when I purchase it so that when it goes out of my bank account, I can just record it as an expense. The fact that I need to put it on the books as an asset or that's what we should be doing generally makes it more difficult because now it's harder to get that triggering factor to decrease the inventory and record the expense. We also have a tracking problem because the same unit or kind of inventory could have changed in cost over time, which leads to these flow assumptions, like a first in, first out and a weighted average or common types of flow assumptions. So there's more or less sophisticated ways that we can deal with that problem that we'll get into in a whole another kind of series or sections of the course. So therefore simply using bank feeds will not be enough to track inventory properly. So I mean we could try to do that, right? We could try to say I'm just going to write off as I pay for the inventory into cost of good sold. But we're going to have to have some method to account for inventory and cost of good sold, at least if we're trying to report our taxes properly, because usually you're going to have to have a cost of good sold calculation even if you're a sole proprietorship to file the proper taxes. So however, we can apply many different methods from less sophisticated to very sophisticated to deal with inventory tracking. So you can imagine different methods you might use for inventory tracking. And you can imagine trying to track inventory within QuickBooks Online, but that gets a little bit messy because QuickBooks Online is not really built to track inventory in an e-commerce kind of situation. You might have some integrations that can do it, but it might not be the best way to go. And it could if you sell a lot of inventory way down the transactions that you're pulling into QuickBooks Online. So then we could do other, we can have other types of methods to track inventory, possibly using third party software, possibly using Excel sheets, possibly we can try to expense basically inventory when we purchase it, and then try to account for the ending inventory periodically do adjustments for ending inventory. So we'll talk about those types of methods. So from a logistic standpoint, we need to make sure we have sufficient quantity to meet orders. Now obviously, when you're thinking about inventory, there's two main things that are going in people's heads. Mainly the people that are that built the Shopify store, their mind is on revenue generation, obviously. And they're thinking I want to track inventory and make sure I have inventory in my store so that when people order stuff, I can fulfill the order logistically. So that's where clearly someone's head's going to be when they're trying to make money with an e-commerce store. From our standpoint, on the accounting side of things, we want to be able to track inventory properly on the financial statements, at least for tax preparation. And also so that when we're deciding what inventory to purchase, what should be the price of the inventory, and how much should we charge for the inventory, those decisions can be made better. So again, usually someone that's using making an e-commerce store is quite good at picking inventory that might be a sellable item, for example, and making a beautiful advertising sales funnel possibly, and then a nice webpage and that kind of stuff may not be quite as good at measuring exactly what the sales price of the inventory should be to maximize both the quantity of sales and their profit margins. And that's difficult to do if you don't have accurate financial statements that can kind of help you with that side of things. Otherwise, you're kind of flying blind. From an accounting standpoint, we will need to report inventory and cost of good sold for taxes at the very least. So even if you're a small business, at the very least, and you could try to do a simple kind of method, you're going to at least need to report ending inventory and cost of good sold on a yearly basis for tax preparation. Okay.