 We're thinking about e-commerce situations where we sell infantry but not on-ground in a store but rather online in the cloud with the help, use and support of third-party applications for example like a Shopify or Amazon amongst others giving us that online presence where we can facilitate the sales and helping us with the logistics of facilitating the sales. We're now looking at this from the accounting perspective and more specifically with the use of QuickBooks online thinking about how we can pull the data into our accounting system so that we can get that data in a relevant form financial statements generally being a balance sheet and an income statement at the least so that we can do our tax preparation for federal income taxes if we are in the United States. We talked about the concept in prior presentations of decoupling the inventory side of the transactions and the sales side of the transaction and related fees on the sales side because that could help us to pull the information that's already being generated with the help of third-party applications like the Shopify's and the Amazon so instead of using a perpetual inventory tracking system where you're generally going to be using a periodic inventory tracking system although we'll touch on the use of a perpetual inventory tracking system as well. So now we are not thinking about trying to get the sales information in but we are now focusing in on the inventory and related expense the cost of goods sold so what are the different kinds of tracking methods that we might use in an e-commerce situation to track our inventory and the related expense of cost of goods sold one method is the easiest method we could use just a cash-based system and just expense the inventory as we purchase it using cost of goods sold as the expense account we'll go into each of these in more detail i'll just list them out first and then we could have a perpetual inventory system using third-party application integration meaning we could use some integrations that would be pulling every transaction in from the third-party platforms such as the Shopify and Amazon into our QuickBooks system and try to track on a perpetual inventory method then we could have a periodic inventory system using Excel or another spreadsheet in other words we might use Excel or some other spreadsheet to be tracking our units of inventory and typically a flow assumption like FIFO or weighted average method and then putting periodic adjusting entries into our financial statements just to get the ending inventory and cost of goods sold correct but not to track the actual units in QuickBooks online because we're going to be tracking them elsewhere in a spreadsheet and then we could have inventory system using third-party app integration in other words if we have more advanced inventory needs we might be having our Shopify or our Amazon helping us to generate the sales and we might then have a third-party app which is helping us to basically manage our inventory exclusively integrated into our system along with our QuickBooks system where we're going to have the financial statements