> embarrassingly bare-bones
How do you draw the line with this? Embarrassing that nobody can use it yet but at least there's momentum? Or embarrassing that it consolidated 3 things but everything else is still done by hand (Excel)?
For e-commerce, the needs seem to grow exponentially for the following questions:
1. What are my gross sales?
2. What are my refunds?
3. What are my net sales?
4. What are my product margins including landed & fixed cost?
This seems to be the barebones to be useful, or to convince people to go through all the trouble to even get started.
In between all of that you discover the real work. Some of your orders are gratis (PR marketing), so they need to post to a different subledger. Some orders use gift cards, and now you've opened the can of worms around deferred revenue. Some of those gift cards weren't backed by cash transactions, but marketing used the system that way to apply discounts.
You start doing backorders. Revenue can't be recognized until a product is delivered, but you only know when it was placed or shipped. You use three different shipping providers. One is a same-day provider that emails invoices.
Oh yeah, you also do "Try Before You Buy" and have inventory in customers hands before you've charged a payment provider (only auth'd). Now you've got an accounting scenario that requires a consultant.
Inventory becomes important. Suddenly you go from simple beginning/end of period (week/month) balances to purchase orders, receipt of goods, and 3PL/EDI integrations. Invoices are in EUR and entered that way, so now forex is needed.
Millions of dollars of inventory can be on the move from factory to warehouse, so now you need to account for that. Logistics team (if you have one) needs to do data entry when things ex-factory.
And of course to even get to complain about that you first need to convince someone to enter purchase orders and invoices in at a SKU level, and train them how to lookup HS codes for tariffs. Enter landed cost and another can of worms.
It feels like Alice in Wonderland, and things just get more batshit crazy complex the further you go. And of course