What we are doing is we are basically taking those reports from the sales channels, we sync them into Link My Books automatically, and we break down these things so they end up with accurate entries directly inside your accounting ledger. That means that as the merchant or as the bookkeeper or the accountant, you go in and you see a nice green reconciliation on your bank statement because everything is matched up against Link My Books entries.
– Daniel Little, Co-founder and CEO of Link My Books
What happens when an entrepreneurial e-commerce seller discovers that inaccurate bookkeeping could derail the sale of his business? For Daniel Little, that realisation helped spark the creation of Link My Books, an automation platform designed to simplify e-commerce accounting.
In this episode of the Accounting Apps podcast, Heather Smith speaks with Daniel about his remarkable journey from selling Coca-Cola from his school locker to building and selling multimillion-pound e-commerce businesses, and eventually co-founding Link My Books.
Together, they explore the complexities of reconciling online marketplace transactions, the importance of accurate tax reporting, and how automation can transform the way accountants and bookkeepers support e-commerce clients. Daniel also shares practical examples of AI agents working inside his business, insights into Link My Books’ acquisition by Visma, and opportunities for accounting professionals to build profitable specialist practices.
Key Discussion Points
- From school locker entrepreneur to accounting technology founder: Discover how Daniel progressed from selling Coca-Cola and sweets at school to creating successful Amazon brands, including swimming goggles, sporting goods and beauty electronics. Hear how an unlikely friendship with a competitor led to the creation of Link My Books.
- Making sense of e-commerce bookkeeping and tax: Understand why marketplace payouts rarely match actual sales revenue. Daniel explains how refunds, fees, withheld taxes and marketplace reserves complicate reconciliation, and why accurate transaction-level accounting matters for compliance, profitability and business valuations.
- AI agents, automation and financial accuracy: Explore where Daniel trusts AI for data analysis, brainstorming and business intelligence, and why he favours rules-based automation for financial accounting. He shares practical examples of AI agents handling weekly competitor research, customer follow-ups and employee performance review preparation.
- Scaling Link My Books and joining Visma: Learn why Daniel and co-founder Peter Morin chose Visma as their acquisition partner in January 2025, despite receiving other offers. Daniel discusses the advantages of remaining founder-led while accessing the collective knowledge, marketing expertise and experience of Visma’s wider accounting technology portfolio.
- Building a profitable e-commerce accounting specialisation: Discover how accountants and bookkeepers can replace time-consuming spreadsheets with automated workflows, develop specialised industry knowledge and provide meaningful advisory insights. Daniel explains how monitoring refund trends helped him identify a costly product fulfilment problem, illustrating the value of turning financial data into actionable business advice.
Final Thoughts
E-commerce accounting presents significant opportunities for accountants and bookkeepers willing to specialise, embrace automation and understand the operational challenges of online sellers.
Daniel’s experiences highlight the importance of getting the fundamentals right. Accurate financial records support tax compliance, cash flow management, profitability analysis and ultimately the value of a business.
The conversation also offers a useful perspective on AI adoption. Creative brainstorming, market intelligence and management reporting present opportunities for AI-assisted workflows, while financial accounting benefits from dependable, rules-based systems and appropriate oversight.
For accounting professionals looking to grow their e-commerce client base, the message is practical: automate repetitive processes, understand the industry, and use the resulting financial insights to help clients make better business decisions.
Episode resources and links:
- Link My Books: https://linkmybooks.com/
- Daniel Little: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-j-little/
- Travis Marziani’s YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3YxwWyrLIM
AI-Generated Transcript
Heather Smith
Hello and welcome to the Accounting Apps Podcast. Today I’m speaking with Daniel Little, who is the co-founder and CEO of Link My Books, the bookkeeping automation platform for e-commerce sellers and their accountants. Daniel leads the company’s product and growth, and is currently focused on applying AI agents across the business from marketing analytics to support. He cares most about one thing: sellers paying exactly the right tax without spending their evenings on spreadsheets. I hope you care about other things, but that’s the one thing that lists that you care about.
Heather Smith
And let me tell you also about Link My Books. It automates e-commerce bookkeeping for 1000s of sellers and around 1000 accounting and bookkeeping firms. It connects sales channels, including Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Etsy, Walmart, TikTok Shop, Square, WooCommerce to Xero and QuickBooks, summarising every payer into an accurate, tax-correct journal covering sales, fees, refunds, and VAT or GST. Founded in the UK by people who’ve been living the problem as sellers and accountants, and now part of Vismar, Europe’s largest privately owned software group, ThinkMy Groups, exists to stop sellers overpaying tax and to give accountants e-commerce clients they can service profitably. So welcome to the podcast.
Heather Smith
My first question for you, Daniel, is: take me back to when you were 12 and selling Coca-Cola from your school locker.
Daniel Little
Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me here. What a question to start with. So yeah, so I think I’ve always been pretty entrepreneurial, and so when I was back in school, I would on the way to school I would buy a multi pack of Coke, and then I would stick it in my locker, and then come break time when the Tuck Shop was open-that’s what we call it in the UK. Like the school had a little shop that they were selling Coke. I would just undercut them, so I would sell it for less, and people would come directly to my locker, and I would sell it to them, and I would make a little profit. And I think that other people sort of cottoned onto it, and they made it a bit more illegal. They brought in cigarettes and sold cigarettes from their lockers and stuff like that. I always like to keep on the good side of the law, so I sold Coca-Cola and sweets. Yeah.
Heather Smith
I love that. I love that entrepreneurial spirit there. I hope your teachers encouraged it. Rather than…
Daniel Little
I’m not sure they encouraged it is the word I would use, but yeah, I certainly tried to fly a little bit under the radar with that one.
Heather Smith
I was on the tuck shop, the tuck shop committee for the school for many years, but I still would have encouraged that sort of entrepreneurialism of the children, even though I was eating into my profits.
Heather Smith
Before Link My Books, you built and sold seven-figure e-commerce businesses. Now, can I ask what sort of businesses they were?
Daniel Little
Yeah. So the first one was a swimming goggles brand. So it started with well, actually, it started before that. So before I started the swimming goggles brand. I was buying stuff in in the UK. We have a shop called Boots and IKEA. You probably know that one. So I was buying stuff there and then basically flipping it on Amazon because people are willing to pay to get it delivered through their Amazon Prime. So they pay a little premium instead of going into the shop and getting it themselves. So that’s how it started, and I realised that that wasn’t really scalable because I was working as a medical rep, so I was selling medicines to doctors, and on the side I was doing this. And every evening I would go to the stores and I would fill my boot with as many things as possible. And it got to the point where it was like every day my boot was full, and then I would do the back seats as well. And so it was like it was never going to scale. And then I did a bit of reading into this thing called private label, and realised that you could like buy stuff in China, and you could make it exactly to your specifications, and stick your label on it, and then you could have a branded good, and that was scalable.
Daniel Little
So that’s what I started with the swimming goggles, and that one didn’t quite get to seven. Well, it did get to seven figures, but we didn’t sell it for seven figures. So that one sold for like high six figures. And the reason we did that was because cash flow was our biggest thing that was holding us back. So we realised that we’d launched these goggles. We had them in like seven different colours. I’d sort of realised that there was a lot more sporting products that we could do the same thing with, but it was expensive because to buy from China you have to pay 30% upfront, and then you have to pay 70% as soon as it goes on the ship, and that can take 30 to 45 days to even arrive. And then you’ve got to wait for those 1000s of units to actually sell before you actually can turn it back into cash and then order the next lot. So it was definitely cash flow that was holding me back. And this was back in like 2012, 2013. So back then, banks weren’t really lending people like me, who had an Amazon business, money to be able to do this type of thing. So I thought, well, the other way we could do this is we could sell the goggles brand and get a bit of a multiple on the revenue and the profitability now, and then use that cash to then launch a whole bunch of other products. So that’s what I did.
Daniel Little
So I flipped the first business and then started the second one, and the second one was in sort of sports and fitness, but then branched out and it became three main brands. One was sports and fitness. One was outdoors, so it was like sleeping bags and tents and things like that. And then the third was like beauty electronics. So we had like these makeup mirrors. My wife liked that idea. She found it, and I was like, “Oh yeah, that looks quite good. And that product actually did very very well. One Black Friday, Cyber Monday. I think we sold around 150,000 units across all of the marketplaces in one weekend.
Heather Smith
That’s a big car boot that you’ve got there then.
Daniel Little
Yeah, that was coming in a container straight to Amazon, luckily, so…
Heather Smith
Wow, wow. And the funny thing is, I’ve been looking. I’ve been actively looking for makeup mirrors because they are quite quite a specific thing. I love that. I love the progression from the Coca Cola all the way up and how you really actually started out quite simply and then just sort of expanded and grew and learnt and yeah. I think listeners listening in will be like sort of thinking, hmm, maybe this is where I should be growing an e-commerce business.
Heather Smith
So, you and your co-founder Peter Morin were competitors before becoming co-founders.
Can you describe how you moved from being competitors to trusting each other in business?
Daniel Little
That is a very interesting story in itself. So Pete actually reached out to me by anonymous email. He’d created like a Gmail account, saying that like he didn’t want to say who he was right now until he knew he could trust me. But we were competitors, but he reckoned that we mutually disliked this other competitor more than we disliked each other. And I was like, “Wow, this is an interesting email. It’s not one you get every day. So, like, followed up, reached back out, and was like, “Okay, well, I think I know who you are then, because I know who I dislike the most of my two main competitors, and you must be that third one. So are you this person? And he was like, yes, that is actually me. And then we ended up jumping on a Skype call back in the day when Skype was around. Spoke on Skype, and basically, long story short, that relationship went from where we were competitors to where we realised that we were literally about to launch the exact same product at exactly the same time, and so we had like a gentleman’s agreement that like okay, when we get to the point where we have like looked at samples of a product that will tell each other what it is, so that we don’t end up launching exactly the same product at exactly the same time because we were in. He was also in sports and outdoors, and we mutually didn’t like this other competitor because they were doing a lot of what’s called black hat stuff.
Daniel Little
So they were like doing review manipulation. They were buying our products and then sending them back in and like damaging them and saying that they were damaged, and they were doing everything like really dodgy to try and get us out of the market, basically. And so we sort of teamed up a little bit against them, and sort of said we’ll protect each other, and we’ll we’ll work like that. And the more we worked together, the more we realised that we had really complementary skill sets. So like I was quite the perfectionist, and like detail really mattered to me. And Pete is like very much on the very low side of 80-20. I would call him more like 60-40. Like once it’s 60% the way there, it’s good enough. Let’s do it, sort of thing. So there was a lot of things like that that like that went really well together to be able to like make me not have to make everything so perfect, and push him to be a little bit more towards perfect. So we ended up in a very good place, both of us. And so we’d always joked about the fact that, like, one day, you know, if we weren’t competitors, we would actually be quite good business partners. And then the idea sort of rolled around that, like, actually, I think it’s probably time to sell my Amazon business because the multiples are doing really well at the moment, and we’ve scaled it to like 25 products. It was doing like 4 million pounds turnover at that point, and so I was thinking it’s probably time to flip this one as well. Do I want to start a new one or do I want to do something else? And at that time, I’d sort of been realising that accounting and bookkeeping was the thing that was tricky for me as a seller, especially when I came to sell that first business because I’d been doing cash accounting without really knowing. And when I came to sell it, they were like, “Ah, we’re going to have to redo your entire accounts because they’re not in accrual basis. And so that, to me, was like a learning curve. It was like, okay, so if that’s that important when you come to sell your business, then that should be something that more sellers should do from the get go, and we should know about. So there must be a tool out there that can do this for me. And that’s sort of where I started looking around, and I was like, well, there is one tool. It’s in the US. It only works for U.S. businesses. It was called A to X, and so that that’s not really suitable.
Daniel Little
And when I spoke to Pete, he said, “Oh well, I’m a software developer, so I built my own. I’ve got a one that I just use myself internally. And that for me was like penny drops moment. I was like, “Hmm, that could be the thing. That could be the thing that me and you end up working on. So I sort of planted the seed with him, and then it just grew from there. That like we became more and more friends. We met up a few times because we’re both living in the UK at the same at that time, and that’s sort of where the the story of Link My Books begins, I guess.
Heather Smith
Excellent. I I was just about to ask you the moment that you realise his tool could become a product, and it’s interesting. I just watched the movie Joy, starring Jennifer Lawrence.
Have you seen that movie called ‘Joy’?
Daniel Little
I haven’t. No
Heather Smith
No?
Daniel Little
Any good?
Heather Smith
So she, the story is about a person called Joy, who me being in Australia and you being in the UK probably have never heard of, but she was in the US selling on the Fox Network Mops.
Daniel Little
Oh, I’ve seen it.
Heather Smith
Yeah, but then Foxtel made a movie about her life, and it was like wow. So I’m listening to you, who’s selling on Amazon, going, Amazon need to come and make a movie about this story because it’s so interesting and it’s got all the twists and turns, and it’s got the rivalry.
Daniel Little
So, yeah. Amazon, if you’re listening, I’m open to offers.
Heather Smith
Yes, absolutely. Well, there’s so much desire for stories at the moment, and it’s such an interesting story.
Heather Smith
So let’s talk about Visma.
For those listening in, Visma is a major European technology company, and it acquired Link My Books in January 2025. What has that experience been like for you?
Daniel Little
It’s been excellent, if I’m honest, to put it in one word. I think they’re exactly. I would almost call them a partner because whilst they did acquire the business and like they are now majority owner, they left Pete and I as founders in place, and they want us to stay around. And that is their whole business model: is that they look for founder-led accounting tech businesses in and around Europe and Latin America, and they want to make they want to take them over and acquire them in full, but they want the founders to stick around and continue running the businesses. So they own in excess of like 200 accounting tech businesses in their portfolio, and all of those are majority still founder led, so the the reason we chose that because there was about 17 people who put in offers to acquire the business when we went to market, and they weren’t necessarily the absolute highest in terms of upfront cash or even total offer value, but they were exactly the partner that we were looking for, because Pete and I are good at solving problems and building product and like achieving excellent product market fit. Partly because we’ve walked the shoes of our customers, so we’ve been e-commerce businesses, and that obviously is a large chunk of our ICP is like merchants, and then we have a team of in our support team. They’re all made up of qualified accountants, so they bring the accountant side of things. So together, we like we really understand these pain points that these customers go through. So once we speak to enough people, it’s just penny drops moment for them as well, and they love it, and like people take on the tool and they they keep it for a long time, but our problem has always been we’re not great at marketing, and so what we wanted was a partner who could come in, who could be that pillar, who could like show us the playbook and help us like learn the way to get this in front of as many people as possible, and so with Visma, that’s exactly what we’ve achieved. Because there’s 200 other accounting tech businesses that are all varying sizes, but most of them larger than us. And further on in the journey, and we have got a Slack group, so we can talk to them, and they have regular webinars and. They’re constantly sharing best practices and talking about things that have worked because we’re all in the same space. We’re all targeting the same ICPS, and we’re not competitors, so we can share everything. So it’s like a collective group of really like fast thinking, like agile business owners. So it’s it’s it’s really really super powerful. It’s like a mastermind group, is sort of how I would describe it.
Heather Smith
Hi, this is Heather Smith here, and I am just jumping in to let you know that Link My Books has come on as a sponsor of the Accounting Apps podcast and of the Two Drunk Accountants podcast, and I encourage you to support our podcasts by visiting Link My Books for all of your e-commerce, accounting, and bookkeeping client needs.
Heather Smith
Yeah, no, it sounds phenomenal. Obviously, I’m here in Australia, and I haven’t heard of Visma, but I can’t. I’m going to go and deep dive into 200 accounting technology. They need to come out to Australia. Brisbane’s got so many accounting technology solutions. So that you know that is fascinating, and that that sort of helps me understand sort of your trajectory.
Daniel Little
Yeah.
Heather Smith
Link My Books has grown from a UK Amazon to Xero tool to supporting channels, and I have mentioned this before. But Walmart, Square, WooCommerce, TikTok shop-I didn’t even know you sold things on TikTok. That’s how old and ignorant I am, and you support both Xero and Intuit. Now, I understand that reconciling sales from multiple platforms is confusing. Okay, so I think that probably a lot of people listening in there. But what I watched a video by Travis Marziana, a YouTube video, and he’s talking about how confusing e-commerce was, which which we understand, but how the Amazon dashboard does not equal what lands in your bank account, and how e-commerce sellers frequently end up reporting their taxes and their earnings incorrectly.
Heather Smith
Can you talk to me about this and how Link My Books helps with multi-platform sales reconciliation?
Daniel Little
Yeah. So I guess that’s what I would call our bread and butter. Like that’s that’s what we solve effectively. So the problem you’ve got with the sales channels is that you make sales through their platform. They take that money off the customer. They then put that into a pot that’s called your seller balance, and then once in a while, like every week or every two weeks, they will send out a payment to your bank account, and that payment is going to be for your sales minus any refunds. But already all of their fees have been taken off, and sometimes they will hold on to a certain portion of that balance because you’re a new seller, or just because that’s their general jazz, they do that like day to day. They’ll hold on to some funds for later on, just to cover potential refunds. And you’ve also got things like marketplace facilitator tax.
Daniel Little
So some marketplaces in certain regions are liable to withhold tax from the customer payments and then pass it straight to the tax authorities so that the tax authorities are basically guaranteed to get it, and so with all of that at play, it’s not as simple as simply saying, okay, I received $10,000 from Amazon and therefore that’s my income. Like that, $10,000 could quite easily be 30,000 of income, and then some fees and some taxes and some taxes that have been withheld and some of that balance that’s been reserved, and then they paid you out $10,000. So you need to be able to look at the detail of each payout and work out for every single transaction, what tax liabilities apply, and so for me, like obviously I’m well biassed, but I do think that really the only way to do this accurately at scale is through software, because e-commerce is changing so much all the time. Like new tax rules come in all the time.
Daniel Little
Software like Link My Books, without yet to the ground, we know when they’re coming. We make the changes in advance, so you’re always protected. You’ve always got that peace of mind that like this is always going to be accurate to the penny. I’m going to pay exactly the right amount of tax, and I say the right amount of tax because a lot of people will say, “Well, I just want to pay less tax, but that’s not really a good idea either, because you need to be sure you’re paying the right amount of tax, not less. Because if you pay too little tax, it can actually work way worse in your favour, way worse against your favour.
Heather Smith
Yes.
Daniel Little
Because if you pay too little and then you don’t come forward, and the tax authorities find out, then there’s penalties that apply. So in the UK, for example, if you don’t come forward and they find out and it was a genuine mistake, the penalty can be 30% If it looks like you tried to do this on purpose, it can be 50% And if it looks like you did it on purpose and you try to cover it up, it can be 100% and it can be a criminal offence. So it’s just as important to pay enough tax as it is to pay as little as you possibly legally can, if that makes sense.
Heather Smith
Absolutely.
Daniel Little
So what we are doing is we are basically taking those reports from the sales channels, we sync them into LinkMeBooks automatically, and we break down these things so they end up with accurate entries directly inside your accounting ledger. That means that as the merchant or as the bookkeeper or the accountant, you go in and you see a nice green reconciliation on your bank statement because everything is matched up against LinkMyBooks entries. So it makes it really easy to be accurate.
Heather Smith
Oh no, that sounds that sounds fantastic, and it is a you can’t claim if you’re doing the spreadsheets wrong. You can’t claim the rents on it. It’s not something you have to have if you’re if you’re in business and if you’re serious about business, then you have to have the right systems in place. And I remember walking into an e-commerce business, and she had 300 post-it notes around her office, and I was like, “Oh! And she’s like, “No, no, no! Don’t worry, I’ve got it all in hand. I’ve got it all in hand. And I was like, “Okay, you’re selling. You’re selling on your Etsy’s and your Instagrams. What happens if someone like Kim Kardashian features one of your products, and you get 5000 sales overnight. What’s going to happen then? And and and she’s like, and and that was the kind of thing. But because that happens in the the e commerce world, doesn’t it? All of a sudden, yeah, yeah, boom! You just suddenly have all these sales come in, and and you have to have the systems in place, and it has to be in this this case like it has to be technology. If if you’re growing off size there, so let’s talk about automation and AI and how they’re changing e-commerce accounting.
Heather Smith
Our audience will understand automation and AI, but in e-commerce, what are you letting your AI agents usefully do, and what should they not be trusted to do?
Daniel Little
That is a very good question. So I suppose looking at it from the the merchants and the accountant slash bookkeepers point of view, I think that AI in general is very good at big data analysis. So giving it a big data set and then saying to it, I want to work out my most profitable products, or I want to work out what are my top sellers and have they changed over a trend of time? I think things like that, I would pretty much 90% 95% trust the output. I would maybe do some random spot checks, but it’s not going to affect your finances or your taxes. It’s you doing an analysis to try and help you to make better financial decisions about growth, but it’s not going to necessarily mean that if that output is wrong, that the tax authorities can come down on your hard. Where I would prefer automation is in that actual financial accounting. It is at the end of the day, accounting is rules. It is. These are the transactions. These are the rules. Together, they make your financial statements. Like it is no more complicated than that. So I think that you can do this manually. You could go through and you could manually look at every transaction and look at all the rules. But you would probably prefer some automation to do that, to just chuck all of the transactions into Claude or ChatGPT and then say create some financial statements for me. Maybe I’m not so trustworthy of that. I would probably say that it’s going to make a lot of decisions by itself. It’s going to potentially hallucinate. It’s gonna not apply the rules in exactly the way that you want them to, unless you know all the rules and you’ve fed them all in as well. So I would say that that for me would be the difference. Where I also see that merchants and accountants can like save time and be efficient with AI is through getting it to generate ideas. So we use it a lot internally. For like, I’ve had a call with a customer. Gemini has recorded that call. It’s made some notes. I then say to Gemini, go and draft a follow up email and. Send it to the customer through Gmail. Like it’ll go to my notes. It’ll think about all the things we talked about during the call. It will think about the next actions. It’ll draft an email. It’ll stick it in Gmail. It’ll grab the customer’s email address, and then it’ll just say, “Here it is, Dan. Do you want me to send it? And then I glance at it and I say, “Yes. So now I’ve spent 30 seconds doing that instead of potentially having to think about what I talked about during the call. Spend 10 minutes making my own notes. Spend 10 minutes drafting an email and then checking it through and sending it off. So I’ve saved myself 19 and a half minutes there, haven’t I? Now multiply that by multiple calls per day. Now you’ve got some efficiencies.
Heather Smith
Yeah.
Daniel Little
And then things like generating ideas, because like as I said, neither me or Pete are mega creative. So once you’ve chatted to an AI agent enough, and once you’ve like given it enough information over time, it just gets better and better. So like my Claude really knows the business very very well.
Daniel Little
So if I say like I’m thinking about. I want to do a campaign where we make an ad that is going to help us to attract more accountants and bookkeepers for LinkMeBooks. Like he could generate 50 ideas right off the bat, whereas for me to generate 50 ideas right off the bat might take me a whole day.
Heather Smith
Yeah. Oh.
Daniel Little
I definitely think that there’s benefits in AI, but I think that you need to be just careful of the output. I would say that the the black and white category is if the output is creative and it’s like analytics that aren’t gonna be used for financial auditing. Great. If it’s financial documents, I would maybe be more trusting of a software that is got the rules in place. I know I’m obviously biassed because obviously that’s our our bag, but I do believe that as well.
Heather Smith
Yeah, no, that’s really interesting. And so for our listeners who are listening in, I just wrote an article about AI temperature. I don’t know if you you refer to it the same as that, but it’s talking about the spectrum of I want a really conservative answer, and many times with accounting in finances we want a conservative answer versus what you you were talking about there. In that you want you want a brainstorm, you want a inspired and and you want inspired, interesting responses, and it’s important to put those kind of words in there to sort of encourage it to push the boundaries. You know, out of the box thinking, and use those words in your prompts. So I just thought I’d drop that in because it was fresh in fresh in my brain for accountants to again, because you know, 50 ideas like you only need four or five of them to to figure it out.
Daniel Little
Yeah.
Heather Smith
But they…
Daniel Little
But I also think that like you need to like not just think of it. For me, AI is not just like talking to Claude, talking to ChatGPT. Like we use it a lot more and more now directly in Claude Code, and not just to do changes to our code base. Like I’m not a developer, but I am now able to take a feature request and run through Claude Code and create that feature within a set of guardrails that our development team have put up. That’s not necessarily what I’m saying that accountants and bookkeepers and merchants should be doing, but if you use Claude Code to build AI agents who have a specific task to to be able to go and do a specific thing. Then you can put them on a scheduled task. So you could say, for example, we have one that runs every Monday that does market intel. So I built that to say I gave it a very specific like role, and said you are a market analyst in the accounting tech SaaS arena. Your task is that every Monday you will go out and you’ll look at our specific three main named competitors to see have they made any changes this week? Have they launched anything new? Have they changed any prices? Is there any new entrants to the market? Is there any new like AI startups that are doing the same thing that we are trying to achieve? Have any of the ERPs made any big changes? So like Xero or QuickBooks. So it does like a whole market analysis, pulls all that information in, looks at all the previous weeks to see if like anything has changed even more than what it talked about last time, and then it generates a brief for the whole team in Slack. So it does all of that itself every Monday. I don’t touch it, and so that to me is like it’s almost like level two of AI. It’s like level one is chatting to the chat chatbot. Level two is creating an agent to do a specific task and then getting it to do that repeatedly, so that you don’t have to do that every week. So I don’t even have to remember to do market intel because it does it.
Daniel Little
And that’s like one thing that we use it for. We also use it for like if we’re having performance reviews with our team, that like we have a set of KPIs for each team member, and we have goals that they are currently working on. So what we’ll do is we’ll have an AI agent for each person for their performance review, and so that AI agent’s job is to every time we’re scheduling a meeting that three days before that meeting it will go away and it’ll look at the Notion documents that we’ve got for specifically that person and their performance review, and it will look at all of their goals that we talked about last time. All the actions they said they were going to do, and it will interview them to see have they done those things, have they moved those goals forward. It’ll send them a message in Slack, and it’ll talk to them, and then they can talk back, and we can update that document ahead of the meeting, so that we can then see like, are they on track? Is there anything else we need to do? So it’s almost like half AI coach where it’s coaching them and mentoring them, and half it’s collecting of all the data so that we can spend a very dedicated 20 to 30 minutes talking about the next steps instead of an update meeting. Is one of the meetings that I hate. It’s like meetings where you just come and you give an update. It’s like I hate.
Heather Smith
No, that’s really interesting, and I’m sure our listeners, especially like the market analysis that you described, can actually sort of get that and take away, but also encourage their clients to do that. But with that idea of talking about their clients, many bookkeepers still handle e-commerce clients through spreadsheets and manual reports.
What is the first practical step you would suggest if they want to systemise their e-commerce clients properly?
Daniel Little
I’m going to sound a bit like a broken record, but I do think that like using software like Link My Books is almost a necessity these days because I always think of it as like if you’re doing this manually through a spreadsheet, you’re probably spending 80% of your time gathering that data from the client. You’re probably having to pester them to send you the relevant reports, or they have to give you the permissions on the sales channels to be able to go in and download them yourself. All of the sales channels’ reports look different. You often need multiple reports from each sales channel to actually be able to get the data you need to do this accurately. And pulling that every month manually and then putting it in a spreadsheet, which is open to human error. You can drag the wrong formula down. Like there’s so many ways that that can go wrong. You’ve then got to keep you to the ground to make sure that there’s no changes in e-commerce tax laws or rules that have changed or new transaction types that Amazon has introduced. Like I think we’ve got 1300 different types of Amazon transactions to date. They’re adding around 10 every week. So like, are you keeping up to date on those things as well? So like, all of that comes into play and just makes your spreadsheet like, if you’re doing this right through a spreadsheet, you are spending a horrendous amount of time on this, and therefore, how much time have you got left over to actually do the real stuff that the client would gain value from the advisory piece, like being able to give them decent financial advice and say, “Look, I’ve noticed that your returns have increased in the German Amazon marketplace. Has anything changed? Like you don’t know that because you don’t have that level of detail. We do. So I think that things like that. It’s like okay, now I implement a software like LinkMyBooks to do this. I can now manage all of my clients through one dashboard. It runs on autopilot. It’s generating really accurate, really nitty gritty financial information. That 80% of the work is now gone.
Daniel Little
Now I can spend all my time in the advisory side. I can often charge the client more money for that side as well. So I’m not losing profitability on that client. I’m actually gaining more value for them, and therefore able to extract more value from them. Like these clients, they’re willing to pay accountants and bookkeepers to get rid of the headache, but they’re willing to pay even more if you’re able to come to them every month with a set of management accounts that actually has some like not just financial data in there, but has like these are the things that I’ve noticed that you probably haven’t as a business owner from a financial aspect, and these are the things that I would probably look at doing about them. So taking the refunds example again in Germany, like that actually happened to me personally, and was one of the reasons we built in like refund ratio tracking, where my German refunds for a product-I can’t remember which one it was-like spiked, and I realised that it was because some of my stock had German text on and some had UK text on, and the German stock had ran out, so Amazon had started fulfilling the goods from my UK warehouse, and it all had English text on, and that was enough to annoy the German customers enough that they would do the returns more often. But I would never have known that had I not looked at my refund ratio. I would have just saw that my profitability was down. That’s it.
Heather Smith
And because it’s the same product, you. You’re not physically moving it yourself, so that’s that is really really interesting. And for for the listeners on this podcast, I’m always saying that e-commerce is one of the areas if you specialise in, you can you can make serious money in. I always say payroll, e-commerce, and inventory clients will always typically if they’re doing well, they have the money to pay you.
Heather Smith
What advice do you have for accountants who want to specialise in e-commerce clients? What advice would you give them?
Daniel Little
Yeah, so I think get your automation sorted so that you can actually scale that side of your business. Because if you’ve only got say two or three clients and you’re doing this manually, it will be eating up your time, and you’ll probably think there’s no way I could have 30 e-commerce clients. Whereas getting your automation piece sorted and having a flow of how you onboard clients into that is just going to give you so much more time. But then I do think that like it comes again back to this piece of like try and think where you can add value for these clients because you’re right. These people are willing to pay good money to get good advice. Like they want to get rid of this bookkeeping headache, but they want to pay even more if you are able to point out three growth tips every single month. They are going to love it, and they will pay you good money for that. And not only that, but they’re also often part of a lot of like WhatsApp or Discord or Facebook or like meetup groups of elite sellers that like to call themselves. And so they will be talking to each other. And if your accountant, if someone in that group is saying like, “Oh, does anyone know a good accountant? I can guarantee you that if you are a decent accountant who is delivering that financial advice every month and is helping them to grow, they are going to be all over it. They will be commenting saying, “Hands down, the best accountant I know is Heather. Like you need to be getting in touch with her. She is going to be able to help you with this. No bother whatsoever. And not only does you do, and they’ll go to town, they’ll say like, not only does she do your financial accounts, but she’s also every month just sending me information about how I can grow the business and just help me X, Y, and Z, and then get a case study on your website. Like, if you don’t have a website and you’re not talking about e-commerce on a whole page, not just mentioning it on your homepage, but if you have a whole page dedicated to it, spend some time learning the terminology like FBA, MFN. Like learn those things, put them on the website, get some SEO articles written about specifically e-commerce accounting, and then get some case studies from customers who you’ve taken them from X size to Y size over a period of time, and get them to give you some quotes about how the accounting played a big part of that, and then maybe if you’ve got a client who like you’ve scaled them to the point where they’ve sold, talk about that as well, because that’s ultimately where most e-commerce merchants will head towards, and good financial advice will get them there quicker.
Heather Smith
That’s such great advice, Daniel.
Daniel Little
Maybe not one piece.
Heather Smith
No, that was rated one piece. We’re starting a webinar series for e-commerce accountants.
Heather Smith
Looking ahead five years, what do you want Link My Books to be known for, and what do you hope accountants and bookkeepers no longer have to do manually?
Daniel Little
Do you know this is funny because we’re actually going through a branding exercise at the moment, and it sounds a bit morbid. But one of the questions was, if Link My Books was to die, and there was a gravestone, what would be written on the gravestone? And so this question is very similar. And so as a team, we came up with. I’m trying to think exactly what it was. We said that I think it was a humorous one, to be honest, because that’s who we are.
Heather Smith
And are also bookkeepers.
Daniel Little
Yeah. No, I think because we they had said 2035, so it’s a lot further in the future. But we’re saying like Link My Books helped you keep the tax authorities at bay until only AI was taxed or something like that. So it was like that. That was the the spin on it. But I think, in all honesty, like how I would like us to be seen in five years is that if you’re doing if you’re dealing with e-commerce clients in either the UK, Australia, or the US, which is our core markets. That one, you’ve heard of Link My Books. That two, you’re using Link My Books, and that three, you’re talking about Link My Books. Like I think that it’s the type of thing that, like, once you’ve seen it and once you realise the efficiencies that can be gained and the extra value that you can provide to clients. I really do think that like it should be the type of thing that you should tell your colleagues about. You should be at accounting conferences mentioning it. So I think maybe that’s a little bit too salesy, but that’s actually what I genuinely believe. Like I think that good products sell themselves.
Heather Smith
Yeah. Yeah.
Heather Smith
So Daniel, thank you so much for joining me on the Accounting Apps podcast.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our listeners?
Daniel Little
Ooh, that is a very good point. So I think that the the Claude Code skill that I was talking about before for the market intelligence, like that, is something that if anyone is interested in setting that up, they can reach out to me because I can share the skill so that they can just insert their business name and insert their competitor names and anything else that’s customised to them, and then they can run that briefing themselves. So maybe I can share that with the audience.
Heather Smith
Yeah, excellent, excellent. So I’ll put a link to Daniel’s contact details. I’ll put a link to the YouTube video I mentioned, and of course a link to link the the the website link my books as well in the show notes. So thank you so much. It’s been really informative. Oh, I do have one question for you.
Do you have an e-commerce business on the side?
Daniel Little
I don’t. I don’t. So when we started Link My Books, Pete and I both Lad sold. Pete was in the process of selling, and we agreed that it would be a bit of a conflict of interest if we were to have both sides. So we’ve maintained that we will just focus on Link My Books. So no, all all I do is Link My Books. I do own a holiday rental property as well, but that’s totally separate.
Heather Smith
Absolutely, absolutely. Oh, thank you for sharing that. It seems like it’s almost becomes addictive, almost the the the selling and the rush from the selling, and so it’s an interesting journey to move to the technology side of that. Thank you, Daniel, for joining me on the Accounting Apps.
Daniel Little
Thank you very much.
Heather Smith
Hi, this is Heather Smith here, and if you like this podcast, I encourage you to jump in and subscribe to the Accounting Apps podcast so you never miss an episode. I also encourage you to jump over to the Accounting Apps newsletter. and subscribe there so you keep up to date with all the accounting technology news that is happening in the industry. So that is at accountingapps.io, and thank you very much again to Link My Books, who have come on as a sponsor of our podcast network, and if you would like to support our podcast, or if you’re interested in Link My Books, please visit them for your e-commerce accounting and bookkeeping needs at Link My Books. Thank you.
