Hope everyone is doing well and enjoyed the holiday season! We are now at the beginning of a new month, and a new year, and that means that it is time for me to share the results from December.   If you missed any of my past financial results posts, you can find them HERE.

We’ll begin with how my time was spent for this past month.  I worked the first full 3 weeks of December and averaged working at least 65 hours per week during this stretch.  From December 22nd through the 31st I was mainly spending time with family and friends and enjoying the holidays.  It was some much needed time off, and over this time I didn’t do much beyond checking in to make sure there weren’t items needing attention, and a few year end house keeping items.

Before we get to the numbers, there is one more topic to discuss.  My goal with sharing my financial results is to show what can be done, and is not meant to be seen as bragging or anything of the sort.  I want to show that working hard and sticking with your plan can pay off.  If the results turn out to be poor at any time I will share that too.

With that said, let’s get into the numbers for December.  I want to provide as much clarity as possible into what I am doing on a month to month basis (if you have suggestions for additions to these posts, please let me know!).  This month I will be showing a slightly different format than I have in past month’s for the income statement.  This month’s income statement will be directly from my InventoryLab account as opposed to transferring the numbers over to excel.  The cash flow statement will be in the same format as in prior months.  This will NOT be the exact number that goes on my tax returns as there will be additional deductions for cell phone, home office, etc.  However, some of these are costs I would generally be incurring anyway, so for simplicity I will be leaving them out of the calculations.  It’s also possible that I missed a receipt or 2 and the spending numbers may be updated slightly, but all numbers from amazon/eBay are 100% accurate.  Also for clarity, this does not include any income from any other sources, it is simply my income from amazon and eBay.

December 2014 Financial Results

The first screenshot will be of the revenues. To get a better look, click on this image (or any others in the post) to enlarge. 

Now, in this second screenshots are the expenses for the month: As stated previously, these screenshots are directly from my InventoryLab account which is the accounting system that I am using.  A couple of notes are that certain items will only show up in one of the time periods even though they occurred over the course of the month, in these instances look at the total number for the month.   Also the “other income” is the net effect of my eBay sales which I manually enter, which happened to be a small loss this month.

The results for December really blew me away, and I am very satisfied with where they ended up.  This was due to many factors, but the largest of these was the increased customer demand surrounding the Christmas season.  One of the other major factors was the results from individuals that are sourcing products for me, as I paid out almost $12K in commissions/wages to these individuals.  In addition to these factors, sourcing from diversified locations really paid off in December.  There were a large variety of items that were sourced via wholesale and liquidation methods that really helped to boost the results this month, which was in addition to the retail and online arbitrage that continues to be a significant portion of the business.  I am considering doing another post about the December results with some deeper analysis including a breakdown of what method I used to source the products, how quickly they sold, the number of items I lost money on, and similar variables.  If you have questions along these lines, let me know in the comments and I will address them there or in a future post.

Here are the current services that I am using that make up the above numbers (note that some of these I paid for on an annual basis to obtain a discount):

InventoryLab – I use their service for listing all of my products for sale on amazon, as well as the majority of my accounting. I use their scanning app, Scoutify, as my main scanning app.  Current cost is $49.99/month, you can sign up for a 30 day free trial with no credit card required.

Shoeboxed– This is a service that I use to manage my receipts.  I send my receipts off to them in an envelope, they scan them into an online filling system, and mail them back to me.  If you sign up through this link you can receive a 1 month free trial, and a 20% discount on your first 6 months if you become a paying user.  Current cost for the plan I am using is $29.99/month.

Appeagle– This is the repricer I am using.  It has been saving me significant amounts of time manually repricing.  In addition, it reprices items up as well as down, so I have sold many items already for more than I have listed them for.  They have a 14 day free trial, and if you enter coupon code “RYAN_G” you will receive 50% off your first month’s subscription if you elect to become a paying user.  The current cost for this service for me is $25/mo.

Feedback Genius – This service automatically sends out emails when items are out for delivery to the customer, as well as 4 days after the item has been delivered.  I tried out the free trial of this service, and it dramatically increased the percentage of orders on which I receive feedback without adding negative/neutral feedback, so I am now a paying customer.

Now, let’s take a look at my cash flow for the month:Cash flow this month was significantly positive as this was the first month ever that I received over $100,000 in deposits from amazon.  In addition to the amounts above, I had my largest amazon deposit ever hit my bank account already in January so cash flow is looking to be significantly positive for January as well.   The one time costs this month were for the purchase of a new computer for my main listing station, as well as the addition of 4 new shelving units at my warehouse.   Overall in terms of cash flow things played out generally how I needed them too, as this positive cash flow, along with the expected positive cash flow in January will make the running total of the past 12 months significantly positive.

Now I will share some screenshots to provide some support for the above numbers I am sharing.  Please note that the amazon sales number will not be exactly the same as what is shown above, as the screenshot below shows all orders that have been placed (but not necessarily shipped), while the above numbers are only for items that actually shipped during the month.  Due to this the variance is to be expected:

If you want to see the categories that these sales occurred in December Simply click this link and a PDF will be emailed directly to you.  

Now for eBay:

Overall, I am very happy with how this month went, and am glad to end 2014 on this high note.  I am really looking forward to what 2015 will bring and plan to continue to share my journey here on the blog.

If you have any questions for me about the above results, please leave a comment below.  How did December go for you? What are your goals for 2015?

Thanks for reading, and here’s to making 2015 the best year yet!