Peculiarities of Accounting and Taxation of Individual Entrepreneurs in the Field of Online Trade

Abstract

Every day, e-commerce is gaining global reach around the world due to the convenience of the format, the rapid development of social media as a trading platform, which began during the COVID-19 pandemic. And in Ukraine, since 2022, since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, e-commerce has become almost the only way to trade safely. The main purpose of the study is to summarize the theoretical and regulatory framework for accounting and taxation of e-commerce, identify the problems faced by entrepreneurs and develop recommendations for their improvement. The article analyzes the latest research and publications of modern scholars, as well as the legal and regulatory framework for accounting and taxation of e-commerce in Ukraine. The article describes the main forms of e-commerce, types of payment transactions and the procedure for their fiscalization in accordance with the current legislation. Starting from the years of the COVID-2019 pandemic to the present day, under martial law, the following forms of e-commerce have become very popular among Ukrainian small and medium-sized business entrepreneurs: social commerce, trade through marketplaces and intermediaries, dropshipping, and mobile commerce. The study identified the lack of legal regulation of e-commerce and dropshipping as a separate type of activity, which complicates the process of calculating entrepreneurs' income, affects the accuracy of tax reporting and the amount of taxes paid. The most frequent mistakes made by e-commerce entrepreneurs when filling out the income and expense ledgers are incomplete reflection of income, duplication of amounts for postpaid payments, failure to take into account commissions of financial intermediaries, errors in the reflection of mixed forms of payment (partial payment, postpaid), errors in the reflection of income in foreign currency. Therefore, recommendations were offered on the specifics of accounting and taxation of online commerce.