$1M on Teachable, with books that finally matched.

The setup¶

A small online education business running ~$1M a year through Teachable. The owner built and sold courses; Teachable handled payment processing, collected sales tax on her behalf, took its platform fee and processing fee out of each sale, and deposited the net to her bank.

What was broken¶

Teachable doesn't sync to Xero or QuickBooks — there's no native connector, then or now. Every transaction has to be exported and broken out manually.

So the owner did the simplest thing: she recorded each bank deposit as revenue. That meant sales tax Teachable collected and remitted on her behalf was sitting on her books as income — even though the money was never hers. Platform fees and processing fees weren't tracked as expenses; they just disappeared into the gap between what customers paid and what hit the bank.

She didn't know her real revenue. She didn't know her real margin. Her tax filings were based on numbers that didn't reflect what was actually happening.

What we built¶

A monthly CSV process: pull the Teachable transaction report, decompose each transaction into gross sales, sales tax, platform fee, processing fee, and refunds, then load the breakdown into the books through a structured journal entry. Sales tax came off the top line. Fees moved to the expense lines where they belonged. Refunds netted against the right month.

Not glamorous. But the books finally matched the platform.

How it runs now¶

Every month: pull the Teachable export, run it through the template, post the entry. Books reflect actual revenue, actual margin, and accurate sales tax handling. Numbers tie to the platform, line by line.

The outcome¶

• Revenue stated correctly — sales tax no longer inflating the top line.
• Platform and processing fees broken out as expenses, so margin was visible for the first time.
• Sales tax handled properly on the books, matching what Teachable was already remitting.
• Books reconcile to Teachable's reports, every month.
• A repeatable monthly process the owner doesn't have to think about.