It's that time of year again - New Year's resolutions, vows to exercise more and,...the looming prospect of tax deadlines. Every year, many online sellers dread rooting through their records and taking a hard look at their finances. Today, EcommerceBytes looks at a new program to help online sellers with this painful task, even if they do business on multiple channels: Outright.com.

Outright gives sellers the ability to view their business data via various easy-to-understand visuals, including pie charts, bar graphs, and even simple tables. You can select from a number of options to get a clear picture of your business metrics, such as your costs, expenses, profit, and more.

Outright currently integrates with eBay, PayPal, Etsy, and Amazon Pro Accounts. And coming sometime in the first quarter of 2012, support for non-Pro Merchant Amazon accounts will be added, "so that all Amazon sellers can import data into Outright," said Outright V.P of Marketing Laura Messerschmitt. You can also link to a bank or credit card account as well as invoicing web sites Freshbooks and Harvest; or receipts site Shoeboxed.

In addition to support for non-Pro Merchant Amazon accounts, coming soon will be a 1099-K validation feature that will allow sellers to validate the accuracy of the 1099-K form that they receive from PayPal and/or Amazon, and click to see which transactions made up the totals on the form, according to Messerschmitt. She says Outright is working directly with PayPal to ensure that this validation feature will match what PayPal is sending. "The 1099-K will go to all sellers who sell over $20,000 and 200 items. It will report the total revenues that the seller received in 2011 to the IRS," she explains. (See EcommerceBytes article, IRS Casts a Wide Net With New 1099-K Reporting Rules for information about the new Form 1099-K.)

Outright auto-categorizes all of a seller's transactions, as well as categorizes them for tax purposes, says Messerchmitt. "Then, if there are any transactions that the system doesn't recognize, the seller can categorize it once and the system learns, so that the auto-categorization gets better over time. The seller has access to the reporting and the tax totals anytime they need them."

Checking Out Your Pieces of the Pie
Outright's home page features a sample "Your Spending" pie chart, which breaks down spending on Product, eBay Fees, Shipping, PayPal Fees, etc. This spending pie chart is a good way to get a visual representation of where your money is going. You can also view this data in table format.

Above: A sample shot of part of a screen which shows "Your Spending" in a pie chart format.

The "Overview" screen is especially helpful, as it gives you an eagle's eye look at your profit and loss, money you have, money you owe, expenses, and even estimated taxes for the quarter.

Above: part of a sample Outright "Overview" screen.

It's hard to argue with the green and red bar chart showing your profits and losses. Seeing this information in such a concrete, graphic format can be a real wake-up call for how much your business is actually making after expenses. (If you're not importing your Cost of Good Sold automatically, you can manually enter them into the "Expenses" ledger using the "Add a Transaction" button.)

In addition to showing profits and losses, the Outright "Reports" tab has a dashboard which lets you view "Types of Income," "Best Customers," "Biggest Vendors," the aforementioned "Your Spending," and an interesting one for the geographically-minded, "Sales by State."

For all those categories, you can choose to view the data by a specific month or year.

Costs for Tracking Your Costs
Outright has both a free and $9.95 per month paid option, which is known as "Outright Plus." However, "All customers who sign up now are getting Outright Plus for free through April 30, 2012," says Messerschmitt.

Customers will then revert to the free version on May first, and can choose to upgrade if they would like, she says. "We did this because we knew that taxes would be particularly painful this year due to 1099-K issues, and we didn't want to make that any worse!" she said.

Normally, Outright Plus would have more features than a free account, including annual, quarterly and sales tax tracking and reporting. But if you opt to stay with the free version, the Outright home screen assures, "You can use your free account forever - no trial or expiration date." The main difference between Outright Free and Outright Plus is the tax reporting, says Messerschmitt, adding, "We'll release more features later."

Signing Up
I found the process of signing up relatively easy. After the initial registration, I was presented with a screen asking me to "Link your biggest sales channel." I chose eBay at the outset, though I later needed to link my Amazon account as well. Outright also gives you an option to suggest another sales channel. When adding the various sales channels, I was guided through screens granting permissions to my various selling accounts.

I was then given the option to link to my PayPal account, and then proceeded to another screen giving Outright permission to access PayPal's transactions. The process of importing the PayPal data then took several minutes. Overall, I found the signup process clear and problem-free.

In fact, if you come through eBay, says Messerschmitt, "you don't even need an Outright login. The application resides within eBay Seller Central." (You can find it in the Selling Manager Summary page in My eBay; just click the new "Applications" tab to the right of the "Account" tab).

Outright Customer Feedback
So how is Outright playing in the real world with online sellers? They have a link on their home page inviting you to "Meet Happy Outright Customers." We also contacted sellers who are using the product, and checked out the messages on the Outright Facebook page. (Their Facebook page is well-maintained, with frequent updates about what the company is up to, information about any known problems or maintenance, and personal responses to users' questions).

"I love using Outright for that part of my bookkeeping," says Etsy seller Hannah Joy Anderson (Etsy.com/shop/Dollmark). "I love that I'm not having to keep up with expenses and income manually, because I know I would mess up somewhere!" She added she also loves all the reports and graphs, "so that I can visually see how I am doing with my business."

Megan Nelson, who runs Embellished Paper on Etsy, says, "I love Outright. Before I found them, I was swimming in mile-long receipts, invoices, sticky notes and PayPal transactions. Now Outright is linked directly to my PayPal account, and since I do most of my buying online (supplies, equipment and advertising), there is very little for me to enter manually." She says she takes less than a half hour every week to enter and look over the statements.

Nelson says she really appreciates the weekly profit statement emailed to her every Sunday. "It reminds me why I've lost sleep, increased stress, and made last-minute runs to the store all week...I'm busy...yay!" She adds she finds it helpful because it keeps her on track, and if the numbers don't seem to look right to her, she knows she needs to review the transactions right away. "I also love the fact that I can see who my top customers are. Sometimes they are buying a little here and a little there and I don't realize they've spent hundreds."

On Users' Wish Lists
When asked if there were any features they wish would be added to the service, Anderson said she'd like to have invoicing. "If I could list my products and services, track sales with what was sold, and be able to print out receipts, I could be even more efficient."

Outright's Messerchmitt notes that in terms of invoicing, "we integrate with Freshbooks and with Harvest." She adds, "we haven't built an invoicing feature ourselves because Freshbooks and Harvest work so well in conjunction with Outright."

Nelson says, "One thing I have a hard time keeping on is the "not sure" section. If Outright doesn't recognize the transaction as a sale or fee, it puts in "not sure." For a while I wasn't thinking much of it, but then at the end of the year I have $1,200 of "not sure" transactions and it can get complicated." She said most checked out to be "personal purchases," because she does shop from that PayPal account, "but some I was not able to match up to anything. I now review the "not sure" transactions weekly, but it would be nice if Outright was able to include more details of the transaction, like an invoice number or description."

Meanwhile, on the Outright Facebook page, user Elton Lin expressed a desire for Outright to add functionality for tracking inventory.

But whether every feature on sellers' wish lists is included or not, especially with their current free offering of Outright Plus, it would seem prospective users have nothing to lose by trying out the program; except, perhaps, their disorganization.