As small business owners, we are swimming in a deep sea of numbers, stats, and financial data on a daily basis (whether you choose to ignore this sea or not is a different story!). Luckily, what you may not know is that Etsy makes it super easy for shop owners to download their sales info in order to calculate their net income in a relatively painless process.

You can download your sales data from Etsy on an annual or monthly basis and quickly export this info to a spreadsheet, where it can be sorted, filtered, summed, and utilized with other data. This is a quick and easy way to calculate all sorts of helpful numbers, including your total sales and shipping, which will be especially helpful for tax time.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to download your sales data from Etsy, and what to do with it once you’ve got it (please note that I use Excel for my spreadsheets):

You’ll then see a screen that looks something like this:

There are lots of different things you can do from here. Etsy offers several items for download, including a spreadsheet of the listings you currently have for sale, your orders by item, your orders by total, your direct checkout payments, and your direct checkout deposits. Read the descriptions to see what else you might like to download. For now, we’re going to use the orders download to calculate our total sales.

Etsy also gives you the option of downloading any of these spreadsheets for a specific month of a year, or for an entire year. Right now, we’ll download all of our orders from last year.

Since I’m using Windows, I’m going to open my file in Excel. From here on out I’m going to give you some step-by-step instructions on how to format and set up your sales data in Excel. You can obviously format it however you’d like, this is just what makes sense to me, and may be helpful if you’re an Excel novice.

After you’ve got your file open in Excel (should automatically open if you selected “open” in the previous step), let’s first make the column widths all pretty so we can actually read all this data.

Now we’ll add filters so we can better analyze all this nice data.

Etsy gives you a lot more information here than you probably need, like the names and addresses of all your customers. While the ship state might be helpful to filter for sales tax purposes, we can hide a lot of columns to make our data more manageable. If we decide we need it later, it’s easy to unhide a column.

I like to freeze my top row so that as I scroll down I still can refer to the column header to know what I’m looking at.

Then we format all our financial data to actually look like money rather than just a number.

Now it’s time to use a simple formula to get some great data, like our total sales, total amount we got paid for shipping, sales taxes collected, and credit card fees.

Excel makes it easy to use the filter function to sort by all sorts of things. Here, we can put our sales in chronological order. We could even choose to only look at one month or one quarter’s worth of sales (also helpful for quarterly tax returns or payments). We can use this function to look at only paypal sales, only international sales, only sales over or under a certain dollar amount…the possibilities are endless.

Let the big green letters below represent the following:

Don’t forget that your gross sales on your tax return should include everything you got paid for shipping as well. You’d report A + B as sales on your tax return. E, your credit card processing fees, would be a tax deduction.

You can copy F, your Etsy net sales, to your personal bookkeeping spreadsheet and then add in any other revenue streams and subtract all your other expenses to get your business’ true net income.

So there you go, a step-by-step guide on how to utilize this wonderful asset that Etsy provides for us! If you didn’t know this existed, I hope you found this helpful. You might also want to check out our ongoing Etsy Shop Stats series of articles to get help on another free asset that Etsy provides!

Do you have any questions on how to download and intrepret your Etsy sales spreadsheet?