Xero is powerful accounting software, but its native integrations fall short when it comes to marketplaces like Takealot. This makes tracking sales and reconciling accounts a real challenge. In this guide, we’ll show you how we’ve helped hundreds of sellers streamline their bookkeeping and sales tracking in Xero for Takealot.
The need for automation
In this article, we’ll explain the best way to set up Xero for marketplace accounting. We’ve worked with the top sellers and accounting firms to refine these processes over almost all sellers’ categories. While many of these concepts are nearly impossible to manage manually—such as capturing sales and returns—automation makes it practical. This approach is the most accurate, optimised, and real-time way to keep track of your business. That’s why we developed Wherehouse: to seamlessly integrate your marketplaces with your core business systems.
The Best Practice Setup
General Ledger Account Codes
Most sellers find it effective to track their Takealot and other marketplace sales using dedicated “holding” accounts, such as:
200 Sales- General B2B sales
201 Takealot Sales- Takealot-specific sales
202 Amazon Sales- Amazon-specific sales
You can apply the same approach for fees:
400 Takealot Success Fees
401 Takealot IBT Fees
These accounts are then reconciled against the bank, matching the weekly or monthly disbursements from each marketplace to the relevant holding account.
Tracking products
Xero is excellent for maintaining visibility on product costs (purchase prices) and tracking sales by SKU.
Rather than creating invoices with generic line items, set up each product as a listed item in Business → Products and Services. This unlocks detailed analytics and insights, helping you identify top performers and track profitability more accurately.
Tracking inventory?
Xero only supports tracking stock in a single location (e.g., your own warehouse). It does not track inventory sent to marketplace warehouses such as the Takealot DC. For this reason, we recommend managing inventory in a dedicated system—or through your online store. For example, Shopify handles multi-location stock tracking very effectively.
Tracking Sales
Recording each marketplace sale as its own invoice is the best approach. This allows you to:
- Track gross sales and deduct marketplace success fees at the order level
- Capture marketplace fees and commissions as negative line items, mapped to their own account codes
- Easily process returns (credit notes) for individual orders without digging through bulk entries
Tracking Returns
Returns are never exciting, but tracking them properly is essential for maintaining a healthy business.
With Xero, you can easily convert an invoice into a credit note, which reverses the sale along with any associated fees.
Wherehouse can fully automate this process for you when you connect your Xero and marketplace accounts to our platform.
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