An online store that doesn’t need orders retyped into accounting

Plenty of online stores work like this: orders come in through the website and someone then retypes them into the accounting system by hand. With a few orders a day, that’s manageable. As the store grows, it turns into a job of its own, and errors come with it.

Connecting WooCommerce to the Czech accounting system POHODA confirmed for me that transferring the order itself is the easy part. Everything around it is what’s hard.

Prices for different customers

Wholesale customers have different prices from retail, and often their own price levels too. Those usually already live in the accounting system. The worst thing you can do is maintain them by hand in two places. It’s better to treat accounting as the source of truth and import the price levels into the store regularly, for example from an XML export.

Stock that isn’t in the store

When goods sit in an external warehouse, the store has to know how much is really there. Stock sync has to run often and has to account for things selling in the meantime. Otherwise you’re selling goods you don’t have.

Currencies and VAT

Switching to euros looks like a simple exchange-rate conversion. Then you find out that besides product prices you also need to convert shipping and payment fees, that rounding works differently in the store and in accounting, and that VAT calculated from different price levels may be off by a few cents. These differences are better solved at the design stage than the first time someone checks the books.

What to take away

• Pick one source of truth for prices, stock and customers.
• Test on real orders, not sample data.
• Watch the edge cases: discounts, returns, shipping in a foreign currency, rounding.
• Assume something will break, and set up alerts that tell you before a customer does.

A well-built integration is boring. It runs in the background and nobody knows it’s there. That’s exactly how it should be.