The E-commerce Client Intake Questionnaire for CPAs

The ecommerce client intake questionnaire that turns discovery calls into confirmation calls — six sections, every question copy-paste ready.

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You're on the second discovery call with the same prospect. The first one went well — good rapport, clear pain, a Shopify store doing solid volume into QuickBooks Online. You drafted the proposal that night.

Then the follow-up email arrived: "Oh — does it matter that we also sell on Etsy? And we added Afterpay last spring." It matters. Etsy is a second channel with its own fees and deposits; Afterpay is a gateway with its own payout schedule landing in the same bank account. Your scope, tooling plan, and price were built on a picture missing two load-bearing facts. So here you are, on call two, re-discovering.

Most firms respond by trying to get better at discovery calls — sharper questions, longer calls, a partner on the line. That's built on a lie worth naming: a good discovery call surfaces everything. It doesn't, and it can't, because clients don't volunteer facts they don't know are relevant. Nobody mentions Afterpay to their accountant unprompted — it's just how customers pay.

Here's the truth that fixes it: an e-commerce client is not an open-ended mystery. There is a knowable, finite set of intake facts — platforms, gateways, channels, volume bands, entity and tax posture, file state, access list — and a written ecommerce client intake questionnaire collects 90% of them before anyone gets on a call. This post is that questionnaire, in six sections, every question ready to paste into your intake form or pre-call email.

Why the Second Discovery Call Keeps Happening

A discovery call is improvisation. You ask what you remember to ask, the client answers what they think is relevant, and everything neither of you reaches for stays invisible until it breaks something — usually the proposal, sometimes the engagement.

Written intake inverts that. The client answers alone, with their Shopify admin and bank statements open — checking instead of recalling. "How many states are you registered in?" gets a real answer from a filing portal instead of "uh, a few?" from memory.

And because the fact set is finite, the questionnaire doesn't need to be clever — it needs to be complete. Six sections cover it. It's the expanded version of the pre-call email in Stage 1 of the 55-minute onboarding process, sent before you've even scoped the work.

The E-commerce Client Intake Questionnaire, Section by Section

Send all six sections as one document. Each question below is written to be pasted as-is.

Section 1: Platforms and Sales Channels

The Etsy question, asked before it costs you a proposal rewrite.

• Which platforms do you currently sell on? (Shopify, WooCommerce, Amazon, Etsy, eBay, Walmart, TikTok Shop, other)
• List every store URL — including stores that are inactive but still have historical sales.
• Do you sell wholesale or B2B on separate terms from your online store?
• Do you sell in person — POS, markets, pop-ups, a retail location?
• Do you have subscription or recurring-revenue products?
• Have you added or shut down any sales channel in the last 24 months?

That last question catches the channel that closed in March but still needs its history booked.

Section 2: Payment Gateways and Payout Cadence

Every gateway is a separate stream of deposits to reconcile. Miss one and the bank feed will tell you eventually, at cleanup rates.

• Which payment processors do you use? (Shopify Payments, PayPal, Stripe, Amazon Pay, other)
• Do you offer buy-now-pay-later? (Afterpay, Klarna, Affirm, Shop Pay Installments)
• For each gateway: how often does it pay out — daily, weekly, monthly?
• Which bank account(s) receive payouts? One account or several?
• Do any gateways hold a reserve or rolling balance?
• Do you sell or accept gift cards or store credit?

Section 3: Volume and Seasonality Bands

Bands, not exact figures — the client can answer in thirty seconds, and bands are all that scoping needs.

• Orders per month, roughly: under 100 / 100–500 / 500–2,000 / 2,000–5,000 / over 5,000
• Annual revenue band: under $250K / $250K–$1M / $1M–$5M / over $5M
• How many SKUs do you carry: under 50 / 50–500 / over 500
• What share of annual revenue lands in your biggest quarter, and which months?
• Roughly what percentage of orders end in a refund or return?
• Do you sell in currencies other than USD, or ship internationally?

Section 4: QuickBooks File State

This section decides whether you're quoting an onboarding or an onboarding plus a cleanup — the single most expensive thing to discover late.

• Do you use QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks Desktop? Which subscription level?
• Who has been doing the books, and for how long? (You, a bookkeeper, a previous firm, nobody)
• What's the most recent month each bank account was reconciled?
• How does your store data currently get into QuickBooks? (A sync app, CSV imports, manual entry, bank feed only)
• Which sync apps are installed now — and which were installed in the past, even briefly?
• Does your chart of accounts have a clearing account for payouts? Do you know its current balance?

The answers here feed directly into the Shopify-QuickBooks file diagnostic — run it before you quote, because a file carrying double-counted income or an abandoned sync app's leftovers is a cleanup engagement, scoped and priced on its own, not a surprise absorbed into month one.

Section 5: Tax Posture

Not tax advice at intake — inventory. You're establishing what exists and, critically, who is responsible for it.

• What's your entity type, and what's your fiscal year end?
• Which states are you registered for sales tax in? List them all.
• Who files sales tax returns today — your firm-to-be, you, or a service like Avalara or TaxJar?
• What's the filing cadence in each state — monthly, quarterly, annually?
• Do you run payroll? Do you issue 1099s to contractors?
• How do you account for inventory and COGS today, if at all?
• Are prior-year returns filed and current, and who prepared them?

The bolded question is the engagement-scope question in disguise. "The client files" and "the firm files" are different retainers, and assuming one while the client assumes the other is how sales tax becomes nobody's job for two quarters.

Section 6: Access and Credentials Checklist

The last section isn't questions — it's requests. Send it as a checklist the client works through before the call, so the call isn't spent watching someone reset a password. Rule of thumb: read-only first. Request reporting-level access everywhere it exists, and escalate to admin only when the work demands it.

• Send a QuickBooks Online accountant invite to our firm login (not a shared password).
• Grant Shopify collaborator access to our firm — and staff access on any other platform you sell on.
• Provide reporting or read-only access to each payment gateway (Stripe, PayPal, BNPL dashboards).
• Provide read-only bank access, or the last 12 months of statements for every account that receives payouts.
• Share access to your sales tax filing portal(s), if you file your own.
• Confirm we may contact your previous accountant or bookkeeper, and share their details.

What Each Answer Changes

An intake answer you don't act on is trivia. Here's the mapping from answer to engagement:

The answer	What it changes
More than one platform or store	Scope and tooling — you need multi-store consolidation, not a single connector, and the retainer prices per channel
BNPL or multiple gateways	A clearing account per gateway and a reconciliation step per payout stream — quote monthly work accordingly
Top volume band (5,000+ orders/mo)	Manual and CSV methods are off the table; sync tooling and its tier are now a line item in the proposal
Heavy seasonality	Error volume and support load spike in peak months — set expectations and staffing now, not in November
QuickBooks Desktop	A migration conversation before anything else — most sync tooling, LedgerPort included, is Online-only
Unreconciled months or a prior sync app	A separately scoped cleanup engagement first; onboarding onto a broken file automates the mess
Multiple registered states, client files	An advisory boundary to draw in the engagement letter — in writing, on day one
Gift cards or store credit	A liability-account policy decision at mapping time, because gift cards sold are not revenue

Every row is a scope, price, or tooling decision — which is the test of a good intake question: if no answer would change the engagement, cut it.

How to Use It: Send, Review, Confirm

The workflow is three steps.

Send it with your proposal materials. The questionnaire goes out before the call, alongside your engagement overview, framed honestly: "This is how we make sure our proposal is accurate the first time." Serious prospects complete it; the ones who won't are telling you something about how document requests will go in March.

Review it before the call. Fifteen minutes with the completed form and you know the platforms, the gateways, the volume band, the file risk, and the tax exposure. Run the file diagnostic if Section 4 raised flags. Draft the scope. This is the new ecommerce client checklist your accounting team runs on every prospect — same six sections, every time, junior-staff-proof.

Let the call be confirmation, not discovery. You open with "You're on Shopify and Etsy, Afterpay and Shopify Payments, around 2,000 orders a month, registered in six states, and you file your own sales tax — did I miss anything?" The client hears a firm that already understands their business. The call spends its time on judgment — scope, timeline, the cleanup conversation — instead of inventory.

That reframe is the whole payoff. The facts were always collectible on paper; a client intake form for bookkeeping engagements just collects them where they're checkable instead of guessable. And if you're building e-commerce into a standing service line rather than a client-by-client experiment, this questionnaire is the front door: the intake instrument that makes every engagement start from the same complete picture.

Retire the Second Discovery Call

The Etsy-and-Afterpay call from the top of this post doesn't happen to firms that run written intake. Both facts were sitting in Sections 1 and 2, answered by the client at their kitchen table, a week before anyone scheduled anything.

Paste the six sections into your intake form this week. Then, when the first completed questionnaire comes back, book a CPA onboarding call — we'll walk the answers with you, map them to scope and tooling, and take the client from completed intake to first reconciled payout with you on the line.