You’ve done your stocktake, your inventory numbers are sorted, and now your accountant is asking for your sales data. WooCommerce is a little more manual than Shopify when it comes to financial reporting, but everything your accountant needs is there. Here’s how to get it out and why connecting to Xero is worth doing if you haven’t already.
What your accountant actually needs
Every accountant is a little different, but at end of financial year for a WooCommerce store, they’ll generally want to see:
Your total sales for the year, broken down by gross sales, discounts, refunds, and net sales. Shipping revenue if you charge for it. Your payment processing fees, since these are a business expense. Any WooCommerce or hosting subscription fees paid during the year. And your GST collected, which needs to reconcile with what you’ve filed or will file with IRD.
When it comes to payment processing fees, it depends on which gateway you’re using. If you’re on WooPayments, your fees sit inside your WooCommerce dashboard and are easy to pull at year end. If you’re using Stripe, Afterpay, or any other third-party gateway, those fees live outside WooCommerce and need to be pulled separately from each provider’s portal.
Exporting your sales reports
Head to Analytics in your WooCommerce admin. This is the built-in reporting section that replaced the old Reports tab back in WooCommerce 4.0 and gives you a much more useful breakdown of your store’s performance.
The reports you’ll want for year end are:
Revenue, set to the full financial year from 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026. This breaks down gross sales, returns, coupons, net revenue, taxes, and shipping in one place. Export this to CSV.
Orders, which gives you a line by line breakdown of every transaction including status, customer, and order total. Useful if your accountant wants to dig into specifics.
Taxes, which shows what GST was collected over the period. Pull this for the full financial year and check it against what you’ve filed in your GST returns.
All of these can be exported to CSV directly from the Analytics section. If your accountant uses Xero they can work with these files directly, but it’s still a manual process unless you’ve got an integration set up.
A note on GST
If you’re GST registered in New Zealand, your WooCommerce store should be set up to collect 15% GST on applicable sales. Check your tax settings under WooCommerce > Settings > Tax to make sure everything is configured correctly, and pull your taxes report for the full financial year.
If there are discrepancies between what WooCommerce shows and what you’ve filed in your GST returns, flag them with your accountant before year end rather than after. It’s also worth knowing that your WooCommerce hosting, any premium plugins, and payment processing fees may also have GST implications worth discussing with your accountant.
Reconciling your sales against bank deposits
How straightforward this is depends on which payment gateway you’re using.
WooPayments is WooCommerce’s own built-in payment solution, similar in concept to Shopify Payments. It keeps everything inside your WooCommerce dashboard, including payouts, fees, and dispute management, which makes reconciliation pretty clean. It’s a solid option, though it hasn’t gained the same traction as Shopify Payments has in the Shopify world, and plenty of WooCommerce stores run on Stripe or other gateways instead.
If you’re using Stripe or another third-party gateway, you’ll need to head to your payment gateway dashboard for payout and fee data. Your Stripe dashboard has a payouts report that shows exactly what was deposited and when. Match these against your WooCommerce order totals to confirm everything reconciles. If you’re using multiple payment methods, you’ll need to do this for each one separately.
It’s doable for a smaller store, but if you’re processing a decent volume of orders manually matching payouts gets old quickly.
Connecting WooCommerce to Xero: the easier way
If you’re doing this manually every month or scrambling at year end, it’s worth knowing there’s a better way. Connecting WooCommerce to Xero means your sales data flows across automatically every day, payouts reconcile against your bank feed, and your accountant has everything they need without you having to export a single spreadsheet.
There are three main options for connecting the two.
Xero for WooCommerce is an official extension built by Woo and available from the WooCommerce Marketplace at $109 USD per year. It installs directly into your WordPress dashboard and automatically creates an invoice in Xero for each order, including product, shipping, discount, and tax data. There’s no separate third-party account to set up, but it has mixed reviews and is fairly basic in what it covers. Worth knowing before you commit.
Amaka connects WooCommerce to Xero, QuickBooks, or MYOB and syncs your daily sales automatically. It handles sales, fees, refunds, taxes, and payment types, and can create either a daily summary invoice or a per-order invoice depending on what your accountant prefers. There’s a free plan for up to 60 transactions a month with paid plans from there. Find out more at amaka.com.
MyWorks is another well-regarded option specifically for WooCommerce and Xero. It syncs orders, customers, payments, and inventory in real time, which is handy if you want Xero to stay up to date throughout the day rather than waiting for an end of day summary. It’s well reviewed and has a reputation for strong support. You can find it in the Xero App Store.
As always, if you’re not sure which option suits your setup, your accountant will have a preference. Set it up in a way that works for how they manage your books and you’ll save yourself a lot of back and forth at year end.
Want help getting your store connected to Xero?
It’s one of those things that’s a bit fiddly to set up but makes everything easier once it’s done. If you’d like a hand, we’re happy to help.
get in touch