Meet the team, and the difference we make
James Fitzpatrick leads Accounting Solution, bringing 31 years of accounting experience to personal tax, corporation tax, property tax, bookkeeping, payroll and VAT clients across Brighton & Hove — including a growing number of e-commerce and online retail businesses.
How a Brighton e-commerce brand stopped their books lying to them about margin
A fast-growing online skincare and beauty brand, selling through their own Shopify store and Amazon, came to Accounting Solution with a problem that’s common among multi-channel sellers: their profit and loss looked healthy, but cash was tight, and nobody could say with confidence which channel was actually making money.
Sales were flowing in from two platforms with two different fee structures and two different payout schedules, but the bookkeeping treated it all as one undifferentiated revenue line. Stock purchases were being expensed as they were bought rather than matched to when the stock actually sold, so the P&L showed a healthy-looking profit even in months where cash was disappearing into unsold inventory. On top of that, VAT on their growing EU sales hadn’t been reviewed since the rules changed — they had no idea whether they should be registered for the VAT OSS scheme.
We rebuilt their bookkeeping around the two sales channels separately, reconciling Shopify and Amazon settlement reports against the bank rather than just the headline sales figure. We restated cost of goods sold to match stock movement, not purchase date, so the P&L reflected what was actually being sold. We reviewed their EU sales pattern, registered them for VAT OSS, and in the process identified import VAT they were entitled to reclaim but hadn’t been.
For the first time, the owner could see true margin by channel — and it wasn’t what they assumed. Amazon looked like the bigger channel by revenue, but once fees were properly accounted for, the direct Shopify store was the more profitable one. That single insight changed where they focused their ad spend. The VAT OSS registration and reclaimed import VAT put real cash back into the business, and monthly management accounts split by channel mean stocking decisions are now made on actual numbers rather than gut feel.
“We were making decisions on what the P&L told us, and it turned out to be telling us the wrong thing. Accounting Solution didn’t just do the books — they showed us where the money was actually going.”