Tax for Discogs sellers, and how to import your Discogs statement

Selling part of your own collection is normally not trading, even when a record has gone up in value. Buying records in order to sell them on usually is: car boot finds, job lots, collections bought from house clearances. Once it is trading, the first £1,000 of sales each tax year is covered by the trading allowance. Above that you register for Self Assessment and report your profit.

Discogs is a reporting platform under the same rules as eBay. Since 1 January 2024 it sends HMRC the sales of sellers with 30 or more orders, or about £1,700 or more of sales, in a calendar year. That is why Discogs asks sellers for tax details.

Reading a Discogs statement

Each row is one order payment or refund. The columns that matter for tax:

• Total order amount is what the buyer paid, including any tax Discogs collected for the buyer’s country. That tax (often VAT for an EU buyer) passes straight to the tax authority and is not your income, so take the order tax amount off. What’s left, the item plus postage, is your sale.
• Discogs platform fee (including tax) and the payment processing fee are your selling costs. Unless you are VAT registered, the VAT on Discogs’ fee is part of the cost.
• Seller payout is the sale less those fees, which is what reached you. It’s a check, not a separate income figure.

A refund row works the same way in reverse: it reduces your sales, and any part of the fee Discogs gave back reduces your costs.

Stock

What you paid for the records you sell is usually your largest cost, and Discogs has no idea what it was. Most sellers keep it somewhere, even if only in a notebook. Leaving it out means paying tax on money you spent.

To bring it in with your statement, add a column called Item cost and put each record’s cost on its row. Quarterwise records it as cost of goods on the date of the sale. If you would rather record stock as you buy it, which is the stricter reading of the cash basis, do that instead and leave the column out, so nothing is counted twice.

Importing it into Quarterwise

1. Download your seller statement from Discogs for the dates you want, as CSV or Excel.
2. Add the Item cost column if you are using one.
3. In Quarterwise, open Imports and upload it. It is recognised as a Discogs statement.
4. Choose your self-employment business, check the preview and confirm.

Sales come in without the collected tax, Discogs’ fee and the payment fee come in together as one expense per order, and refunds reduce both. Upload a later statement, or the same one again, and orders already in your books are skipped.

Selling on eBay too? Its transaction report imports the same way, into the same business. See tax for eBay sellers.

Common questions

Last updated 3 November 2026. Quarterwise is software, not a tax adviser — if you’re unsure how the rules apply to you, check with HMRC or a qualified accountant.