Shopify and Campfire
Shopify and Campfire: the commerce half the ledger does not include
Campfire is a good ledger with no commerce domain — no items, no inventory, no purchase orders. Shopify runs the operation. Between them sits every question your accountant cares about: what sold, what it cost, what the payout contained, and what the stock is worth.
Scope
What has to reach the ledger
Six flows. A summary journal entry covers the first three badly and the last three not at all.
01
Orders
Every sale, at the granularity finance needs, posted on the right date and to the right entity.
02
Refunds and returns
A refund crossing a period boundary is the single most common way a commerce ledger goes quietly wrong.
03
Settlement
A Shopify payout is a net figure. Gross sales, fees, refunds, chargebacks and adjustments all have to be decomposed to reconcile to the bank.
04
Inventory valuation
Stock on hand, movements and a cost basis that produces real COGS rather than an estimate applied at month end.
05
Purchasing and landed cost
What you paid the supplier, plus freight and duty, landed on the right units, or your margin reporting is fiction.
06
Tax liability
The liability has to land in the ledger accurately. Filing is a separate job for a filing engine.
Options
Three ways to bridge it
Build against the API
Fits when
You have engineering capacity and an unusual model that no product fits.
Watch for
Campfire’s API is a ledger API: journal entries, bills, invoices, memos, revenue contracts. There is no item, order or purchase-order object to build against, so the commerce domain is yours to own and maintain.
A financial summary bridge
Fits when
You want payouts summarised into the ledger and nothing more.
Watch for
It solves the bank reconciliation and stops there: no inventory, no purchasing, no landed cost, no unit-level COGS.
Manifest for Campfire
Fits when
You want the commerce domain handled as one system rather than assembled from parts.
Watch for
Our commerce operations layer, built on SCG Lightning: orders, refunds, settlement, purchasing, landed cost and inventory valuation, posted to Campfire as accounting truth.
Whichever route you take, one rule holds: the inventory subledger an auditor will test does not live in Campfire. Campfire holds the control account. Decide deliberately where the detail lives. About Manifest →
Process
How the project runs
1
Map the money
Every flow from storefront to bank: orders, refunds, payouts, fees, chargebacks, supplier invoices and freight.
2
Agree the posting rules
What posts as what, on which date, to which entity and account, signed off by your controller before anything is built.
3
Connect and test
Flows run against a test store and a trial tenant, including refunds across period boundaries and split settlements.
4
Reconcile a real month
A full period reconciled end to end before anyone depends on the numbers.
5
Support the close
We stay through the first closes, because that is when the edge cases arrive.
FAQ
Questions commerce finance teams ask
Does Campfire integrate with Shopify?
Not natively. Campfire’s published integration catalogue covers banking, AP, payroll, revenue, sales tax, FP&A, close and CRM, and contains no e-commerce channel. Anything connecting a storefront to the ledger is built or bought separately.
What does Campfire’s API actually cover?
Journal entries, chart transactions, bills, invoices, credit and debit memos, fixed assets, revenue contracts and performance obligations, with webhooks. There is no item master, sales order, purchase order, fulfilment or location object, because the product has no commerce domain.
Where does inventory live if not in Campfire?
In whichever system holds the subledger. Campfire holds the control account. The item-level history an auditor tests has to exist somewhere else, and that somewhere needs immutable movement history and a defensible valuation method.
Can we just post a daily summary journal entry?
You can, and plenty of brands start there. It reconciles the bank and tells you nothing about margin by product, because a summary entry has no unit cost in it.
Do we still need a tax engine?
Yes. The commerce layer produces the liability accurately; Avalara or Numeral files it. Anyone telling you the integration handles filing is describing a different product.
Running Shopify with Campfire behind it?
Tell us how you post sales today and where inventory is valued. We will map what the ledger is missing and what it takes to close it.