eBay → Zoho Books
eBay pays you net.
HMRC judges you gross.
Every payout is your sales minus fees minus refunds. Book that deposit as income and your turnover is understated by every fee you have ever paid — the exact figure the VAT threshold tests.
PayoutBooks reads each payout from eBay’s Finances API and posts one balanced journal to Zoho Books. Gross turnover, visible fees, a bank account that reconciles.
Built and run by a UK tax specialist on his own eBay business.
Book the deposit and you hide £1,024.28 of turnover in one week.
The problem
One deposit. Three things wrong.
Real figures from one week of trading. The bank shows £342.09 arriving. The business actually sold £1,366.37.
Turnover understated by £1,024.28 in a week. Fees never appear as the expense they are. Refunds are invisible. And the VAT threshold creeps up on you with no trace anywhere in your books.
True turnover. £440.34 of fees claimed. Refunds recorded gross. The clearing account returns to zero the moment the deposit lands, so the bank reconciles to the penny.
How it works
Set it up once. Then it’s Wednesday’s non-event.
-
Connect
You register your own eBay and Zoho keys — guided, and included in the setup package. Read-only on eBay. No passwords stored anywhere, only revocable tokens on your own machine.
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Verify
A preflight check tests the whole chain and names anything wrong. A dry run then shows the figures before anything is posted, so you reconcile against Seller Hub with your own eyes.
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Forget
A weekly schedule posts each payout’s journal. Your bank feed matches the deposit against eBay Clearing in one click. Re-runs never double-book.
It refuses to guess
Every journal must reconcile to the payout to the penny, or it is not posted — you get a report naming the discrepancy instead. Bad numbers never reach your statutory records quietly.
Two shops, one set of books
Run as many eBay accounts as you trade under. Each gets its own journals; all of them land in the same Zoho organisation.
Your data stays yours
It runs on your machine, or your own private repository, against your own credentials. Nothing routes through us. There is no server to trust.
VAT
Registered or not, the journal is right.
Not registered
Everything booked gross — which is correct. Fees gross is your true cost, because that VAT is irrecoverable. And gross sales is the precise figure that counts toward the registration threshold, sitting in one account you can watch.
Registered, standard scheme
Sales, fees and refunds split net and VAT into your Output and Input VAT accounts, including reversing output tax on refunds. The splits reconstruct exactly, so the journal still balances to the penny.
On the Flat Rate Scheme? Gross mode is the right setting — gross turnover is the base your flat percentage applies to. The tool declines flat-rate and margin schemes as automatic splits rather than posting numbers that would be wrong.
Running cost
Nothing, per month.
Every moving part has a real free tier. The only cost that ever appears is your own accounting subscription — which you pay with or without this.
| What | Monthly | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| eBay developer account & Finances API | £0 | Free, comfortably inside call limits |
| Zoho Books API | £0 | Included on every plan, free plan included |
| Weekly scheduled run | £0 | Your own computer, or a private repository’s free automation minutes |
| PayoutBooks itself | £0 | One-off purchase. No subscription, ever |
| AI assistant | £0 | Not required — the scheduled run is a plain script |
| Zoho Books subscription | £0–10 | Free under the plan’s turnover limit; your accounting software either way |
Subscription alternatives charge £15–50 every month — £180 to £600 a year, on top of the same Zoho bill. The only recurring cost here is ten minutes every eighteen months, to renew an eBay token by hand.
Pricing
Buy the tool, or have it delivered working.
The software is the easy part. Registering API keys across two platforms is the part people lose an afternoon to — so you can simply not do it.
The package
£99 one-off
- Everything needed to run it yourself
- Setup guide written for non-developers
- Preflight diagnostic that names any problem
- Weekly scheduling templates
- Mac and Windows
Setup service
£199 one-off, package included
- A guided session: both platforms connected, keys registered, tokens issued
- Your chart of accounts created, VAT treatment set correctly
- First payout reconciled against Seller Hub together, then posted
- Bank matching rule and the weekly schedule armed
- A written verification report as proof it all works
Accountants and bookkeepers: practice terms available for setting this up across client books. Ask.
Questions
What people ask first.
Do I need my own eBay and Zoho API keys?
Yes, and that is deliberate. Your credentials stay yours, access is revocable by you in seconds, and nobody else’s system ever holds your financial data. The setup service exists because registering them is fiddly, not because it is risky.
Does it work if I am not VAT registered?
That is the default, and gross booking is the correct treatment. It is also how you get an honest view of your rolling turnover against the registration threshold — something net deposits hide from you completely.
What happens if the figures do not add up?
Nothing is posted. A payout’s journal is only written if it reconciles exactly; otherwise you get a report of the discrepancy and the transaction types behind it, and you decide. Unusual cases belong with your accountant, not with a script.
Will it double-book if it runs twice?
No. Journals are keyed to the payout reference, so a repeated or overlapping run recognises what is already recorded and skips it. A missed week catches itself up on the next run.
Do I need to leave my computer on?
Only if you want to. The weekly run can live in a private repository’s free automation instead, so it happens whether or not your laptop is open. Both options are included and documented.
Is this accounting advice?
No. It is bookkeeping automation that writes to live records, so the first posting is reviewed with you and anything unusual goes to your accountant. What it guarantees is arithmetic, not judgement.
Stop understating your turnover
Your next payout could book itself.
Set up in an hour. Then it runs every week, for nothing, forever.
Get PayoutBooks