The Bare Minimum You Need to Know About Accounting

New post from The eCommerceFuel Blog:

Knowing how to read a financial statement and a few other basics of accounting is vital in an eCommerce business. Without basic knowledge of accounting, you may think you're raking in the cash when you're actually in the red. We're covering everything from the basics of reading an income statement to the ins and outs of your store revenue. Subscribe:  iTunes | Stitcher (Wth your host Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com and Bill D'Alessandro of RebelCEO.com) Andrew: Welcome to the eCommerceFuel Podcast, the show dedicated to helping high six and seven figure entrepreneurs build amazing online companies and incredible lives. I'm your host and fellow eCommerce entrepreneur Andrew Youderian. Hey guys, it's Andrew here and welcome to the eCommerceFuel Podcast, thanks so much for tuning in today. Today on the show, extremely gripping topic we've been wanting to cover for a long time. The absolute bare minimum you need to know about accounting. And joining me, an ex-finance guy who is the perfect man to geek out about this. Bill, I'm sorry we don't have whiskey this time to chat but hopefully you'll still stick around until the end of the episode. Bill: I really should have put that in my contract, shouldn't I have? Andrew: Top shelf, $400 a bottle whiskey otherwise I'm not coming back to the show. Bill: That's right, I need whiskey or we'll not record this stuff. I won't hang out with you if we don't have any whiskey. Andrew: To keep things interesting without the whiskey and also, let's be honest, accounting unless you're Bill may not be the world's sexiest topic, we've inserted a couple fun little secondary scenes shall we say throughout the episode. You'll have to listen real carefully to hear them but yeah, just keep your ears perked for those. And Bill, should we get into it? Bill: Yeah, we should get into it. We should call this episode "Front Lines Accounting." The Function of Your Income Statement Andrew: "Front Lines Accounting," I love it, I love it. So Bill there's really three crucial financial statements that you need to know. The income statement, the balance sheet and the cash flow statement. And we're going to tackle each of those individually and we'll go ahead and start with the income statement. So Bill, how do you describe the income statement in a nutshell? What is its function and how do you look at it? Bill: The easy way to think about an income statement really is, this is the amount of money that your business made over a certain period. Most income statements you'll see are kind of yearly or monthly. And you in theory could do a daily income statement but I don't think it would be very instructive. So most people will do monthly, will do an income statement and it will show a total for the year and then broken down by month. At the top you'll see revenue and then you will subtract from revenue your cost of goods sold, which is basically the amount of money it cost you to make that revenue. Then you'll have a gross margin, and that's basically the amount of money you have after selling your stuff, the amount of money you have available to use to pay overhead. And then you'll have a section called expenses or sometimes you'll see it called SGNA or selling general and administrative expenses and those are all the overhead expenses of your business, salaries, rent, your subscription to the eCommerce Fuel private members forum, all sorts of things like that go in the SGNA expenses section and then at the bottom you have a number called net income, also or hopefully known as profit and not loss. Andrew: Yeah and it's kind of important to clarify that revenue is equal to sales, revenue is at the very top. It's not how much you make, it's just the gross amount of money you collect from your customers before you pay any expenses. Sometimes you might hear that called top line,