Selling physical products makes two things hard that a generic ledger handles badly: inventory and COGS, and a payout that arrives net of fees across several channels. Pick for those, not for the invoicing.
Two things make ecommerce books hard, and neither is invoicing.
A deposit from Shopify Payments, a marketplace, or a processor arrives net of fees, in a batch, sometimes spanning a month boundary and sometimes in a currency other than the one your bank is in.
One bank line can stand for hundreds of orders, several kinds of fee, and a refund. A generic ledger will happily let you book it as a single lump of revenue, which is wrong in a way that only surfaces when someone tries to reconcile gross sales to the deposit and cannot.
Cost of goods sold has to move when goods move, not when an invoice clears. Landed cost includes freight and duty. Stock sitting in a 3PL is an asset with a value that changes.
This is the part generic accounting software handles worst, and it is the honest reason a specialist can charge $245 a month. If you hold stock, weight this heavily.
We learned this on our own books. Three months of Shopify Ads receipts, matched against credit card lines, went one slot off — the first match was wrong and every match after it inherited the error. Ninety receipts sat against the wrong charge. The software accepted all of it and the reconciliation simply refused to balance.
Nothing about that was an arithmetic failure. The amounts were right. The evidence was attached to the wrong thing, and no ledger in this list would have told us, because none of them are asked to.
If inventory and COGS are your hardest problem, buy the specialist and stop reading comparison pages.
If your hardest problem is that money crosses a border before it reaches you — ad spend in USD, payouts in USD, a bank account in CAD, input tax credits that depend on holding the right document — then the evidence trail matters more than the inventory module, and that is the case we are built for.
Best for: The specialist. An ecommerce-tailored chart of accounts, inventory and COGS as first-class concerns, and reconciliation built for channels and 3PLs.
Watch out: $245 a month is the highest entry price here, and the Starter plan requires you to be under $1M revenue and four years old or less.
Best for: Canadian sellers who need inventory management inside the ledger, with GST/HST for CRA and a bilingual interface.
Watch out: Inventory and multi-currency are both on the C$72 Plus plan — for an importer that is the tier, not an upgrade.
Best for: Sellers already running Zoho Inventory, since Books shares the item list and customer record.
Watch out: Annual invoice caps on every tier, and multi-currency starts at Professional.
Best for: The widest bench of bookkeepers who have seen ecommerce books before, and an app marketplace with connectors for most channels.
Watch out: It records what you give it, including a wrong entry, and the connectors are where the wrong entries usually come from.
Best for: Running inventory and accounting on one data model, with the accounting app free for unlimited users.
Watch out: Inventory is a second app, which moves you to CAD 35.20 per user per month across the team.
Best for: Cross-border sellers where the hard part is evidence and currency — USD ad spend against CAD statements, receipts that have to support an input tax credit.
Watch out: Ours, and we are not an inventory specialist. If landed cost and COGS are your actual problem, Finaloop knows things we do not.
Because the deposit is not the sale. Shopify Payments, a marketplace, and a payment processor all settle net of fees, often in batches, sometimes across a month boundary and sometimes in another currency. One bank line can represent hundreds of orders, several fee types, and a refund.
If you hold stock, yes, and it is the thing generic ledgers do worst. COGS has to move when the goods move, not when the invoice is paid, and landed cost includes freight and duty. This is the reason a specialist like Finaloop can justify $245 a month.
This is the failure we hit on our own books — three months of Shopify Ads receipts matched one slot off against the card lines, and the reconciliation refused to balance. Foreign-currency ad spend against a domestic card statement is a documentary problem, not an arithmetic one.
Odoo's accounting app is free for unlimited users and is a real ledger. But inventory is a second Odoo app, which ends the free plan. For a seller holding stock, free tends to stop being the answer earlier than it does for a service business.
Claims about other products last verified August 25, 2026