Florist bookkeeping: wire orders, shrink, and event deposits

Wire orders settle net, not gross

A wire-service order runs in one of two directions, and each needs its own treatment. An incoming order is a US or out-of-town customer's order that a network like FTD or Teleflora routes to your shop to fulfill locally — you deliver the flowers, but the network pays you net of its referral and processing fees, not the full retail price the sending customer paid. An outgoing order is your own customer's request that you cannot fulfill locally, so you pay another florist through the network to deliver it, and the network's cut comes out of what you collected from your customer. Recording either one at its gross retail figure overstates revenue and understates the network fee as a cost, which distorts both your margin and your HST filing.

Perishable inventory means real shrink, tracked weekly

Flowers wilt. A florist's inventory count is only useful if it happens often enough to catch loss before it compounds — weekly, not monthly, for cut stock. Cost of goods sold should split by category: fresh cut flowers, greenery and foliage, and hard goods like vases and ribbon each carry a different margin, and blending them into one COGS line hides which category is actually losing money to spoilage. A stem that arrives already past its best is a supplier-credit conversation, not a write-off you simply absorb — tracking spoilage by supplier over a few months usually shows whether a delivery schedule or a specific grower is the real problem.

The cooler is inventory storage, and it costs money to run

A florist's walk-in cooler is not incidental overhead the way a stockroom shelf might be for other retailers — it is the piece of equipment that determines how much shrink you actually take, and its running cost belongs in the same conversation as the inventory it protects. Refrigeration maintenance and repair are a normal operating expense, distinct from the capital cost of the unit itself, and worth tracking on their own line so a cooler nearing the end of its useful life shows up as a cost trend before it fails during a holiday week.

Wedding and event deposits sit in a liability account

A deposit taken in October for a June wedding is not October revenue — it is a deferred revenue liability that converts to revenue on the event date, once the arrangements are actually delivered. Funeral homes and corporate accounts add a different wrinkle: these are recurring credit customers billed on account rather than paid at the counter, so an aged accounts receivable list matters here in a way it rarely does for a counter-sale business, and a funeral home account that quietly slips to 60 days is worth a conversation before it becomes a habit rather than a one-time exception. Corporate accounts run the same way, usually paying monthly on a standing order rather than per delivery, so the invoice register needs to match what was actually delivered each week, not just what the standing order says was billed.

Holiday weeks distort a same-store view unless tagged separately

Valentine's Day and Mother's Day can account for a large share of a florist's annual revenue inside two single weeks, and a monthly financial statement that blends those weeks into ordinary trading makes every other month look artificially weak by comparison. We tag holiday-week revenue and cost separately, so the rest of the year's trend is legible on its own, and the two big weeks can be measured against themselves year over year rather than blurred into an average that means nothing to either. On the expense side, wire-network membership dues are typically billed in USD, which means recording USD dues paid to a US wire service consistently at the rate on the charge date rather than a rate chosen after the fact.

Source: CRA — GST/HST Memorandum 4-3, Basic Groceries (flowers are not a zero-rated food product).