Profit, cost basis, and bookkeeping

Cost basis is what an item cost you to acquire, and it is the number every profit figure in PalmFlow is built on. Record what you paid, let fees arrive from eBay on their own, and real profit is a page you open rather than a year-end spreadsheet panic.

Cost basis: the number everything depends on

Cost basis is what you paid to acquire an item — the purchase price, and optionally the costs to get it sale-ready. Every profit figure in PalmFlow is built on it, so:

• Enter a cost when you add an item, or import it from a CSV.
• For items already in stock without a cost, fill it in — your margins are only as accurate as your cost basis.

How net profit is calculated

For each sale, PalmFlow works out net profit from:

• Sale price — what the buyer paid.
• Marketplace fees — pulled in automatically for eBay sales; entered with the sale for manually logged channels.
• Shipping and other costs you record.
• Cost basis — what the item cost you.

The result is real net profit per item — not revenue dressed up as profit.

Reports

• See profit, cost of goods, and fees per item and over time.
• Break profit down by platform so a multi-channel business sees the whole picture in one place.
• Spot trends — your best months, your slowest-moving inventory, your true margin.

Tax time

Because PalmFlow already holds your cost basis, sale prices, and fees, the Reports page gives you the figures a Schedule C asks for — gross receipts, deductible expenses, and net business income — drawn from the data you've been keeping all year. It isn't a filled-in form, and it isn't tax advice; it's the numbers, so there's no reconstructing a year of sales from memory and a shoebox of receipts.

Full detail, including inventory valuation and what each plan shows, is in Tax reports.

Fees, filled in for you

Fees are the difference between a sale that looked good and one that was. When you record a sale, PalmFlow fills the fee in for eBay, Etsy, Mercari, Poshmark, and Depop from each platform's published rates. It's always a starting figure — change it whenever a platform charged you something different. Shopify, Amazon, and anything logged as Manual ask you for the fee, because there's no single published rate we'd be comfortable inventing on your behalf.

For real eBay sales, the actual fee comes back from eBay itself rather than an estimate.

The free fee calculator covers nine marketplaces and goes deeper than the record-a-sale prefill: eBay alone carries eleven category schedules plus Store-tier discounts and UK, Canadian, Australian and German regional rates. It also runs backward — give it the profit you want and it tells you what to list at, or shows the price at which you break even.

PalmFlow gives you the numbers; it isn't tax advice. For how your specific situation should be filed, talk to a tax professional.