SO i have been running a physical location for a while. My company produces videos for corporate mostly. We ended up releasing a CD for a local band though, which i have consigned to some record stores as well as selling them in my companies online store.
My issue is this.
I set up a simple online store, the buyer pays with paypal, paypal sends me notification, quantity bought, final price, location, etc.
The paypal i used is my own personal paypal, which since im an LLC i guess it doesnt really matter since everything just runs together according to the IRS.
I guess my main question is this, what is the most efficient way i can streamline this and keep track of quantity so i can get the artist the deserved (and accurate) royalties.
Should i change my paypal to go to my business account?
SHould i just print every order i get and methodically keep track of it?
Is everything ok how it currently is?
I know this is kind of a strange question, if there is need for clarification please let me know, i am curious on what you Dopers can help me come up with.
You only mention one band and I’m unsure if you’re worried about getting that one band the royalties or are considering expanding in the future. If it’s really just one band, go into paypal monthly and export your sales to a CSV file. Open it in excel and use that as a report of royalties. Calculate the royalties due in order to arrive at an amount and clean up the exported data a bit if you want to make it presentable and give the band a full report.
If you’re considering selling for multiple bands, just make sure that your online store passes adequate information to paypal when the customer clicks “buy” and gets sent off to paypal to pay you. As long as each transaction is identifiable you’ll be fine, so if the item description is Bandname 1 Video and Bandname 2 Video, when you export your data you can filter it out and generate your royalty totals and supporting documentation.
I don’t see any reason to make it any more complicated than that.
Also I would set up a second paypal account that is linked only to the LLC’s bank account to keep things clean.
If there’s one thing I learned from my business law class (and really, there was only one thing I learned because I was horrible at it), it was DON’T COMMINGLE FUNDS
Do business on a business account tied only to the LLC.
Can i just go and switch my account in paypal? Is it really that simple?
And yes, i currently have 3 more CDs and a DVD looking to get released in the next 12 months. So i do plan on expanding, into how many different artists? No idea.
You have to be careful with PP and limits. When I had my own business, for the first year anytime I received more than $500.00 PP got very suspicious and locked my funds for 20 days.
Google Checkout actually cancelled my account when I received $500 and it turned out to be a huge mess as they refunded other people because that trigger to them, said I was a fraud. I would never recommend Google Checkout.
PP will also make you verify info to get money and it will set limits for the first year or until they get a sense of your business.