Cash accounting records a transaction when money actually moves. Accrual accounting records it when the sale is made or the cost is incurred, regardless of when the money arrives.
For a marketplace seller the two can describe the same month very differently, because marketplaces almost never pay you in the period you sold.
The same month, two answers
You sell $10,000 in the last week of March. The marketplace pays out in early April.
- Cash basis: March shows $0 of that revenue. April shows $10,000. March looks like a bad month and April looks like a great one, and neither is what happened.
- Accrual basis: March shows $10,000 of revenue and a $10,000 receivable. April shows the receivable turning into cash, and no new revenue — because the revenue was already recorded.
Accrual answers "how did the business do in March." Cash answers "what hit the bank in March." Both are real questions; they are just different ones.
Which does SalesImporter use?
Accrual, and marketplace selling is the reason. Recording a sale when it happens — and tracking what the marketplace still owes you as a receivable — is what makes it possible to check your books against the marketplace's own balance. On a pure cash basis, money sitting with the marketplace is simply invisible until it lands, and there is nothing to reconcile.
It is also why the Balance Sheet can tell you what you are owed. Cash-basis books have no way to show that.
Which should you file on?
That is a question for your accountant, and possibly not a free choice. Tax authorities set rules about which method a business may use — they depend on your size, structure and what you sell, and they change. Nothing here is tax advice, and you should not pick a method based on a help article.
What is generally true: many small businesses keep accrual books for managing the business and let their accountant convert to cash basis at tax time if that is what applies. Accrual books can be converted; cash books cannot easily be turned into accrual ones, because the information was never captured.
That asymmetry is the practical argument for recording the detail even if you file the simpler way.
The one that trips sellers up
Inventory. Buying $5,000 of stock is not a $5,000 expense — you swapped cash for an asset, and you still have the value, just in a different form.
It becomes an expense (Cost of Goods Sold) when the items actually sell. Treating a big inventory purchase as an immediate expense makes a good month look terrible, and then makes the month you sell it look better than it was.