Summary Posting (Journal Entry Posting)
Summary posting is designed for high-volume merchants or businesses with standardized transactions and minimal need for customer-level accounting detail.
Key Benefits:
🔹 Streamlined Workflow
Ideal for posting bulk transactions efficiently. Consolidates all orders over a period (typically daily) into a single journal entry in QuickBooks.
🔹 Suited for Low-Value, High-Volume Orders
Recommended for businesses that handle large numbers of low-ticket transactions where individual order-level detail is not critical.
🔹 Simplified Reporting and Reconciliation
Reduces clutter in your accounting system, enabling faster report generation and easier bank reconciliation.
🔹 Basic Financial Overview
Provides a snapshot of total revenue, cost of goods sold, taxes, and fees for a period—sufficient for high-level financial review.
🔹 Efficient Record-Keeping
Reduces the number of accounting entries, making it ideal for operational efficiency and low-maintenance bookkeeping.
Considerations:
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Limited visibility into individual transactions or customer behavior.
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Not optimal for businesses needing customer-level reporting or audit trails.
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May limit granularity in profitability or performance reporting by item or customer.
Transactional Posting (Individual Transactions)
Transactional posting provides a detailed, order-by-order representation of your financial activity in QuickBooks. It’s ideal for businesses requiring deeper financial oversight and customer management.
Key Benefits:
🔹 Detailed Financial Records
Posts each order as a unique transaction (e.g., Sales Receipt or Invoice), allowing for itemized tracking of sales, discounts, shipping, and tax.
🔹 Enhanced Inventory Management
Automatically updates inventory levels per order, improving inventory accuracy and reducing stockout risks.
🔹 Customer-Level Insights
Allows QuickBooks to store and maintain data per customer—enabling personalized reporting, marketing strategies, and relationship management.
🔹 In-Depth Reporting & Profitability Analysis
Supports reporting by product, category, location, or customer. Ideal for businesses that require margin tracking, segmentation, and budgeting insights.
🔹 Better Forecasting & Financial Planning
Detailed historical data facilitates accurate forecasting, trend analysis, and cash flow planning.
🔹 Improved Audit Trails
Creates a comprehensive audit trail for each transaction, making it easier to validate revenue and tax reporting during financial reviews or audits.
Considerations:
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Generates more transactions in QuickBooks, which may increase file size and impact performance for large order volumes.
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Requires more robust QuickBooks setup (including mapped products, tax, and shipping settings).
How to Choose a Posting Method in Webgility Online
To configure your posting method:
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Log in to Webgility Online.
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Go to Connections → Preferences (from desired sales channel).
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Under Posting Settings, select your preferred method:
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Summary Posting (Journal Entry)
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Transactional Posting (Sales Receipts or Invoices)
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Note: If you change your posting method at any point, you must review and possibly reconfigure your sync settings. Different methods require different account mappings, tax settings, and product configurations.
Final Recommendations
Choose Summary Posting if you:
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Process thousands of low-value transactions daily.
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Don’t need detailed reporting by customer or product.
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Want streamlined reconciliation and minimal accounting records.
Choose Transactional Posting if you:
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Manage inventory at the product level.
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Rely on detailed customer or product analytics.
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Need accurate audit trails and compliance-ready financial data.
Follow the steps in this helpful article on: How to Configure Transactional Settings in Webgility Online.