How to track your Vinted sales and profit

Vinted tells you two things: how many items you have sold and what is in your wallet. Neither is your profit. The wallet is what buyers paid; what you paid for the stock, the postage you covered and the mailing bags came out of a different account, weeks earlier, and nothing on Vinted ever puts the two side by side. If you want to know whether this is making money, you have to keep the books yourself. This guide is how.

Why your Vinted balance is not your profit

Say you sold ten items this month for £240 between them. Your wallet says £240 and it feels like a good month. Now add up what those ten items cost you: £95 at the car boot and the charity shop, £6 of postage to get two of them to you, £4 on a repair, and £11 of postage you paid out on the heavier ones because the buyer would not have paid it. The ten items made £124, not £240. Then take off the month's mailing bags and the fuel to the car boot, and you are somewhere around £100.

That is still a good month. The point is that you only know it is because you wrote the costs down. A reseller who tracks revenue alone has no idea whether the £240 month beat the £180 one, because the £180 month might have come from stock that cost £30.

What to write down for every item

One row per item, and the row carries the whole life of the flip. These are the columns that matter, in the order the money happens:

• What it is, the brand and the size, so you can group by them later.
• Where you bought it. Which charity shop or car boot actually pays is a question you can only answer with this written down.
• What you paid for it, and the date you paid. The date is what your tax year runs on.
• Postage to get it to you, if you bought it online.
• Extra costs: cleaning, a repair, a replacement button.
• The date you listed it and the price you listed at. Days to sell is measured from the listing, not the shop.
• The date it sold and the price the buyer paid you.
• Any fee the platform took from you. On a standard Vinted sale the buyer pays the protection fee on top of your price, so this is usually zero; eBay is different.
• Postage you paid to send it, where you covered the label.
• The date it came back, if it was returned.

Profit is then one sum: what it sold for, less what you paid, less postage in, less extras, less fees, less postage out. Done on every row, it also gives you the two figures that matter more than the profit itself: margin, which is profit as a share of the sale price, and return on cost, which is the sale price divided by everything you had in the item.

When to write it

The cost goes down on the day you buy, standing in the shop if you can. It is the one figure nobody can reconstruct later: a month on, a bag of twelve charity-shop finds is twelve items with a vague total and no idea which was the £8 jacket and which was the 50p belt. Everything else can wait until the evening, but the cost cannot.

The listing goes down when you list, the sale when it sells. If you batch this up once a week, do it from Vinted's sold list rather than from memory, and check the dates. A sale recorded on the wrong side of 5 April lands in the wrong tax year.

Three ways to keep it

A notebook or a notes app works for a handful of items and fails at fifty: nothing adds up, and the one time you need a total is the time you have least patience for a calculator. Most resellers move to a spreadsheet, which is the right second step. The template on this site is built for exactly this: one row per item, a dropdown for the status, profit working itself out, running costs on their own sheet and a summary that adds everything up. It opens in Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers.

A spreadsheet stops at the typing, though. It does not know a sale has happened until you tell it, it cannot see that something has sat unsold for forty days, and it cannot tell you which brand is paying without you building the pivot table. That is the gap an app fills. Vintify syncs your Vinted and eBay sales every hour, keeps the cost you logged against each item, and does every sum above for every item, with the totals, the tax report and what to buy more of. It also reads the spreadsheet, so moving across is an import rather than a retype.

The five figures to read every month

• Net profit: item profit less the month's running costs. The one number that says whether the month worked.
• Margin: profit as a share of sales. Under about a third and a single return or lost parcel wipes a sale out.
• Return on cost: sale price over everything you had in the item. The same £20 profit is a great flip on £10 of stock and a poor one on £200.
• Money in unsold stock: what you have paid for everything that has not sold yet. A good sales month can still leave more cash in boxes than it brought in.
• Days to sell, from the listing date. Rising means your pricing or your photos have slipped, or you are buying things nobody wants right now.

The mistakes that make the numbers lie

• Counting revenue as profit. The commonest one, and the reason this guide exists.
• Forgetting postage in. An item bought online for £12 with £3.50 postage cost £15.50, and the £3.50 is the easiest figure to lose.
• Counting postage the buyer paid. If the buyer paid for the label it never touched your money. Only postage you paid comes off your profit.
• Putting running costs into item costs. A roll of mailing bags is not part of one hoodie's cost; spreading it over items understates the one you put it against and loses it from the rest. Keep it on its own sheet and take it off once.
• Not dating things. Profit without dates cannot be put into a tax year, and the trading allowance is a question about a year.
• Backfilling the cost from memory. It will be wrong, it will be wrong in the direction that flatters you, and every figure built on it inherits the error.

Where tax fits

The records above are the records HMRC asks for: what you sold, what it cost, when, and the receipts behind the running costs. Whether you owe anything depends on your total income from selling against the trading allowance, and on your other income, which no spreadsheet can know. Keep the records whatever the answer turns out to be; HMRC can ask for them up to six years later. The complete Vinted tax guide on this site walks through the allowance, registering, and what you can deduct.

How Vintify does it

The app is this guide, done for you. Log what you paid when you buy, from your phone in the shop. Your Vinted and eBay sales arrive on their own every hour and land against the item. Profit is one formula everywhere, in whole pence, so the pennies add back up to what you paid. Analytics cuts the result by brand, category, platform, size, colour and source; the tax report lays your UK tax year out on both the cash and the accruals basis; and the action queue tells you what has sat unsold too long. Bring your spreadsheet with you: the importer reads it in any of the languages Vinted trades in.