In this guide, we will tell you how Synder helps to aggregate summaries in a new, optimized way that is perfect for ecommerce businesses.
Overview:
- Accounting for ecommerce data: Basic challenges
- Connect all platforms to Synder and see summaries getting ready
- How Synder aggregates ecommerce data into summaries: Basic principles
- What to expect on the Mapping page?
- How to reconcile ecommerce summaries
- Something is wrong with summaries aggregation: Why and what to do?
Accounting for ecommerce data: Basic challenges
Selling on ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Amazon, WooCommerce, etc., has many opportunities, and there are many apps that can work together to help expand your business. For example, you may be selling on Shopify and have Stripe, PayPal, and Amazon connected to it as payment gateways, so that your customers have more options to pay you for the ordered goods.
However, utilizing this many apps at a time, one needs to make sure that all relevant data from all platforms is reconciled in the books, and not a piece is missing. Shopify stores your order and customer details, while Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.net contain the actual payment information, including fees and payouts that are sent regularly to one’s bank account. All of this needs to come together and reconcile, and it’s especially intricate when you want to summarize ecommerce data for better visibility and easier management. Below, we discuss various scenarios demonstrating how this integration works, using Shopify as the ecommerce platform and Stripe as the payment gateway for illustration.
Connect all platforms to Synder
To help Synder collect all the details about your sales orders and account for fees and expenses from various gateways, you need to connect your ecommerce shops and all payment gateways you use to accept customer payments.
If you’re selling, for example, on Shopify and accept payments through Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.net, select all of the platforms involved in your money flow during the first steps of Synder onboarding:
2. Give Synder access to connect to all these platforms on the needed level
You might need to log in to each account or send invitations to account owners to do that for you.
3. Select the starting date for importing data from all connected integrations
Select the desired date and click ‘Import’ to finish onboarding and get Synder to start processing your data.
A few points about data import into Synder you need to be aware of
Use case 1. Sequential connection of ecommerce platforms and payment providers
Sometimes, during onboarding, you may only connect one or two platforms. Later, you might realize you need to add more integrations for synchronization, such as additional payment gateways for your Shopify store. You can easily do this in your Synder account at any time. Remember to select the same date for data import from both the ecommerce platform and its gateways. This ensures no data is missed and transactional details are properly identified. For example, during onboarding, you connected only Shopify to Synder and selected July 1, 2024, as the ‘From’ date for data import. Then, after finishing the onboarding, you remembered that your Shopify orders sometimes get paid through Stripe, so you connect it as well. When importing data from the newly connected integration (Stripe), Synder will offer you to select a date for data import – and here it’s very important that you select July 1, 2024, too.
What happens if you select, e.g. July 5, 2024?
If there were some Shopify orders paid via Stripe within the period July 1 – July 4, 2024, Synder won’t know that, and some essential transactional data will be missing. Because of that, after you review and sync summaries for July 1-4, 2024, you will most likely see some discrepancies in your financial reports.
Use case 2. Summary status changing to ‘Pending’ when data import is initiated
When you start importing transactions from a newly connected gateway (like Stripe from the example above), you will notice that most of your summaries have the ‘Pending’/’Fetching’ status even if they have already been ‘Fully fetched’. This happens because Synder checks whether the most recent data import from newly connected platforms will add details to the already imported data.
For example, if you connected your Shopify account during onboarding, Synder immediately started importing your Shopify transactions and working on the summaries. However, if you connect Stripe later and start importing data from it, Synder will check for any transactions in Stripe that might be related to your Shopify orders. If there are such transactions, Synder will need to rebuild some summaries to include all the new details. That’s why some summaries may temporarily show as ‘Pending’ or ‘Fetching’. This process won’t take too long, and you’ll soon be able to review the updated versions.
4. Let Synder get the summaries ready
After you complete onboarding, you’ll land on the ‘Summaries’ page, where you’ll notice all summaries marked as ‘Fetching’ or ‘Pending’.
This is perfectly normal. Since you have a lot of data, Synder needs some time to process and aggregate it in the best way. It may take up to 24 hours to finish all processes in the background, so give Synder a little time.
What Synder will be doing during this time:
- Looking at transactions from each connected platform.
- Checking all ecommerce order details, including payment gateways used for each of them.
- Checking if transactions from gateway platforms are related to ecommerce sales or are just stand-alone platform transactions that need to be accounted for separately (e.g. Stripe may be used to accept payments for Shopify orders or to accept payments on another platform unrelated to Shopify sales – and Synder needs to check the links and differentiate between those transactions).
- Creating journals for each transaction in the background.
- Performing basic data aggregation (later you will be able to fine-tune your mapping and make it as detailed as you prefer).
As you can see, there is a lot going on under the hood, so if you just connected all platforms to Synder, check back in a few hours or the next day to see if the summaries are ready. Once the status of a summary updates to ‘Fully Fetched’, it means that all data from all connected platforms for a certain period is fully processed by Synder and ready for your review and further actions.
How Synder aggregates ecommerce data into summaries: Basic principles
All transaction data from the ecommerce platform and its payment gateways is compiled into one comprehensive daily summary. Let’s say you’re selling on Shopify and accept payments through Shopify Payments (native Shopify payment gateway) and Stripe. In this case, all transactions processed by both Shopify Payments and Stripe will be aggregated into a single summary.
To check that, follow these steps:
- On the ‘Summaries’ page find a summary from the Shopify integration.
- Click on the summary line to open Summary Preview.
- Scroll down and see the ‘Included in this summary’ block containing transactions from all payment gateways linked to Shopify sales.
Important note:
On the ‘Summaries’ page you might also notice summaries for Stripe integration (see screenshots above). This means that Stripe has transactions not related to Shopify sales, so Synder will collect such stand-alone transactions into separate Stripe summaries for accurate accounting.
What to expect on the Mapping page?
Mapping is an essential part of summaries aggregation. It defines the final result of financial data synchronization to your books and ensures accurate reports. For ecommerce businesses, there are a number of use cases mentioned below of how the Mapping page should be displayed for your convenience.
Use case 1. Ecommerce integration tab
An ecommerce integration tab (e.g. Shopify in our case) will include lines related to all payment gateways that take part in collecting payments for Shopify orders. The ‘Integration’ column will display the name of the selected ecommerce platform (e.g. Shopify), and the ‘Payment gateway’ column will indicate the name of the related payment gateway(s), e.g. ‘Stripe Test’ in our case. If you have multiple gateways connected to the ecommerce shop, you will see mapping lines for all of them (e.g. Authorize.net, PayPal, Amazon, etc.). Map every line according to the category in your books where you would prefer this type of data to be posted. Read more about mapping in this guide.
*Note: Synder identifies “Ecommerce vs. Gateway” relations between platforms during initial data import after onboarding, as well as during any data import initiated by you or the system. This means that more mapping lines might appear with time.
For example, you have been using Synder for 3 months now and have only been using Stripe as a payment gateway for Shopify, but now you have decided to connect PayPal to Shopify as well, and your recent orders have been paid through this gateway. Synder will recognize this new payment gateway during the import of your recent Shopify orders and display new lines in Mapping, allowing you to set up PayPal data synchronization as well.
The advantage of this Mapping view is that you will be able to map data coming from different sources to different accounts in your books all under one tab. This ensures that everything you are mapping relates to your Shopify sales, making it easy to track and account for.
Use case 2. Non-ecommerce integration tab
If you are using a payment integration like Stripe not only as a gateway connected to your ecommerce shop but also as a stand-alone processor for payments unrelated to ecommerce sales, Synder will display mapping lines for categorizing this financial data under the ‘Stripe’ integration tab in Mapping. The ‘Integration’ column will contain the Stripe platform name. This way you will know this sales data comes directly from your Stripe and is not related to Shopify orders. The ‘Payment gateway’ column will most likely say Online sales, POS sales, Manual orders, etc., depending on the specifics of the platform connected. With Stripe, it is pretty straightforward – Online Sales, but other platforms with more ways to receive payments may have variations, which Synder will display for you.
Note: If your payment integration contains only transactions that are related to ecommerce sales, this integration’s stand-alone mapping tab will be empty, since there is no need for mapping.
How to reconcile ecommerce summaries
Reconciling your ecommerce summaries is very straightforward with the ecommerce flow. For example, using the Finances Summary report available on Shopify. This simplifies the comparison of transaction details across various payment gateways.
When you access the financial summary report in Shopify, you’ll find it includes all transaction data, such as manual payments and orders, alongside payments processed through connected gateways such as Stripe. The report displays totals split by each payment gateway. If you use multiple gateways, each one will be listed, showing how transactions are distributed among them.
To reconcile, you need to review each line in the report to verify the number of sales recorded. Compare these figures to the data displayed in Synder and what has been synchronized to your books. This method consolidates all transaction verification to one location, streamlining the reconciliation process by allowing you to compare everything in one report.
If your Stripe integration is exclusively used for Shopify sales, there will typically be only one summary for the day that encapsulates payments from both platforms. However, if on Stripe you also process payments not related to Shopify, an additional Stripe summary for the same date will appear, showing aggregated data for such Stripe payments. This distinction is crucial for maintaining clarity in your records.
In instances where Stripe handles various payments from different platforms, refer to the Stripe balance summary report to compare and reconcile these figures.
Synder helps by separating ecommerce sales from non-ecommerce sales, and the summary preview includes only Stripe transactions because it relates to a standalone payment gateway. ensuring that you have a clear picture of what was sold that day.
By following these steps, you can efficiently ensure that your ecommerce summaries are reflective of your actual sales and transactions, making the entire reconciliation process easier to manage.
Something is wrong with summaries aggregation: Why and what to do?
At some point, on the Summaries page in Synder, you might see the following banner:
Here is what it means:
When many integrations are involved in one complicated process of accounting for financial data, sometimes tiny ‘hiccups’ might occur. Each integration has its own technical architecture and logic, and sometimes when they are trying to ‘talk’ to each other and work together in terms of e.g. accepting money for online orders – things might get messy.
We have noticed that sometimes payments from processors lack essential order information from ecommerce shops. This can confuse Synder about where to allocate the money, such as to Shopify sales or stand-alone Stripe sales. And if there are multiple ecommerce platforms connected (e.g. Amazon and eBay apart from Shopify), which ecommerce initiated an order that this particular Stripe payment relates to? In such cases, Synder can detect basic information, like recognizing that a certain Stripe payment was used for an ecommerce order. However, it may not know exactly which order or from which platform the payment came.
In such cases, you as a user will also see one or more unmapped lines in Mapping:
The ‘Payment gateway’ column will say ‘Unsupported Gateway Sales (Ecommerce!)’.
This way Synder tells you that unfortunately, it couldn’t link certain payments to specific orders, but it still realizes such payments are related to ecommerce sales and need attention during mapping.
Since resolving each individual case may require technical expertise from the Synder Team, please follow the instructions in the warning banner and contact our support specialists via in-app chat or at [email protected]. No worries, this is not a critical error. We display this warning to ensure that Synder does not map certain data types to generic accounts in your books without your knowledge, which could make your financial reports inaccurate. So with the help of our support team, you will be able to resolve such cases successfully.
This guide aims to ensure you navigate Synder’s functionalities with ease, optimizing your ecommerce transaction management for better financial oversight.
Reach out to Synder Team via online support chat, phone, or email with any questions you have – we are always happy to help you!