The accountant who does excellent work for a services business will quietly wreck an inventory business, and the interview rarely surfaces the difference. General practitioners are trained on a model where revenue arrives, expenses go out, and the gap is profit. Ecommerce breaks that model in four places: inventory is an asset until it sells, marketplace deposits are net figures hiding a dozen components, sales tax collection is split between you and platforms you do not control, and cost of goods sold has to be calculated rather than observed.
Seven questions that separate the two. Ask them in this order, because the early ones filter fastest.
1. How do you handle a marketplace settlement deposit?
This is the fastest disqualifier in the list. A marketplace pays you a net number after referral fees, fulfillment charges, refunds, reserves, storage, and adjustments. Amazon’s fee structure alone is category-dependent, as its published fee schedule shows, with referral rates varying by category and price band.
A candidate who says they book the deposit as sales revenue has told you everything. Your revenue will be understated by the full fee load, your expenses will be missing entirely, and your margins will look wrong in a way that is hard to trace.
The answer you want describes breaking the settlement into components: gross sales, refunds, fees by type, sales tax collected, and the net deposit that ties to the bank. Whether they do that through a tool or by hand matters less than whether they know it has to happen.
2. What costing method do you recommend for my situation, and why?
Listen for a question back rather than an answer. The right method depends on how your costs move, how fast you turn inventory, and what your tax posture is. Someone who names a method immediately, without asking about your purchasing pattern, is reciting rather than advising.
A candidate who is comfortable here will also mention that this is an election with consequences. IRS Publication 538 on accounting periods and methods covers the inventory rules and the small business taxpayer exceptions under Regulations section 1.471-1(b). You do not need to understand all of it. You need to hear that they do.
3. Where do you draw the line on nexus questions?
The honest answer to a nexus question is often that it depends and that the position should be documented. A candidate who says with confidence that third-party fulfillment inventory definitely does or definitely does not create an obligation, without qualification, is overconfident about genuinely contested ground.
Better answer: they will help you build the state-by-state analysis, they will tell you where the position is clear and where it is not, and they will say plainly when something needs a specialist or a direct conversation with the state’s department of revenue.
Follow up by asking what they would do if you discovered a prior-period exposure. If voluntary disclosure does not come up, keep interviewing.
4. What will you need from me, and how often?
You are testing whether they understand that ecommerce close is a data problem before it is an accounting problem. The answer should include landed costs, inventory counts, and marketplace reports on a defined cadence.
If the request is just “send me the bank statements,” they are planning to do cash-basis bookkeeping on an inventory business. That produces books that look fine monthly and fall apart at year end, when inventory has to be adjusted and a year of accumulated error arrives at once.
5. Which systems do you actually work in, and which have you set up from scratch?
Working in a system and implementing one are different skills, and implementation is where the damage happens. A bad initial mapping of marketplace data to chart of accounts produces errors that persist for years.
Ask specifically about the stack you run or intend to run. The category has sorted along a clean line: A2X and Link My Books build settlement journals into QuickBooks and Xero, with A2X publishing pricing from twenty nine dollars a month at low Amazon order volume and cost of goods sold beginning on the tier above. Sellerboard handles Amazon profit analytics from nineteen dollars a month without touching the general ledger. ConnectBooks covers multi-marketplace accounting sync into QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise, and Xero with automated cost of goods sold, inventory tracking, and SKU-level profit reporting.
A candidate with real experience will have opinions about which fits your situation and will be willing to say a tool is wrong for you. A candidate who says they work with all of them equally well probably has not implemented any of them.
6. How do you price, and what happens when volume grows?
Ecommerce books scale with transaction count, not revenue. A seller going from two thousand to eight thousand orders a month has quadrupled the work at the same revenue if average order value dropped.
Get the pricing structure in writing, including what triggers a change, what is in scope monthly, and what is billed separately. Ask specifically whether the annual tax return is included, because the assumption that it is included is one of the more common sources of a surprise invoice in the spring.
7. Who actually does the work?
You will often meet a principal and be served by a staff member, which is normal and fine. What is not fine is not knowing. Ask who prepares, who reviews, what their turnaround is, and what happens when that person is unavailable.
Also ask about credentials without treating them as the whole answer. A CPA license means specific things about examination, licensing, and continuing education, and the AICPA maintains the professional standards those licensees work under. It does not mean the person has ever reconciled a marketplace settlement. Plenty of excellent ecommerce bookkeepers are not CPAs, and plenty of CPAs should not touch your inventory. Use the credential as one input, not the filter.
What good looks like
The candidate you want asks more questions than they answer in the first conversation. They want to know your channel mix, your order volume, your SKU count, your fulfillment arrangement, and whether you have ever had inventory sitting in a state you did not expect.
They are specific about what they will not do and who they would refer you to. They can describe a mistake they have seen an ecommerce business make, in enough operational detail that it is clearly a memory rather than a talking point.
And they will tell you what they need from you before they will sign off on anything, which is the single best predictor that year end will be uneventful.