Quick answer: An Amazon settlement report lists every transaction behind a payout: sales, refunds, referral fees, FBA fees, advertising, reserves and tax. To reconcile it, download the settlement flat file, group each line by type, post one entry per settlement with each group in its own account, split settlements that cross month-end, and match the net to your bank deposit.
Key takeaways
- Amazon pays out about every 14 days, so settlements rarely match calendar months.
- 15% is the most common referral fee, plus FBA fees if Amazon fulfills.
- Marketplace sales tax is collected and remitted by Amazon; record both sides.
- Reserves are your money held back, so they’re a receivable, not a cost.
- Inventory at FBA is still yours until it sells, is removed or is written off.
Amazon tells you that you sold $20,500 in the last two weeks. Then $11,860 lands in your bank. If you’ve ever stared at that gap and wondered which number belongs in your books, the answer is: neither, on its own.
The settlement report is where the two numbers meet. Once you know how to read it, every deposit can be broken into sales, fees, refunds, advertising and reserves, and your P&L finally reflects how the business performed.
What is an Amazon settlement report?
An Amazon settlement report is the statement Amazon produces for each settlement period, listing every transaction that went into a payout: orders, refunds, fees, promotions, advertising charges, reserves and adjustments. It’s the bridge between the sales you see in Seller Central and the deposit you see in your bank.
You’ll find settlement reports under Payments in Seller Central. You can view a summary on screen or download the detailed flat file for reconciliation.
How does the Amazon settlement cycle work?
Amazon doesn’t pay you as orders come in. Once your account is settled with a positive balance, Amazon pays out about every 14 days, and a transfer can take up to five business days to reach your bank. Amazon also holds proceeds for a period after delivery to cover refunds and chargebacks.
Some sellers also have an account level reserve, money Amazon sets aside against returns, chargebacks and claims. New accounts, accounts under review or below performance targets are more likely to see one. Reserves are your money, held back for now, so they belong on your balance sheet, not as a cost.
This cycle means settlement periods rarely line up with calendar months. A period that runs from December 24 to January 7 holds sales from two different years.
What’s inside a settlement, line by line?
Here’s an illustrative two-week settlement.
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Product sales | $20,000 |
| Shipping credits | $500 |
| Sales tax collected by Amazon | $1,400 |
| Sales tax remitted by Amazon | −$1,400 |
| Referral fees | −$3,000 |
| FBA fulfillment fees | −$3,200 |
| Refunds | −$900 |
| Sponsored Products advertising | −$1,200 |
| Professional selling plan | −$40 |
| Reserve held this period | −$1,500 |
| Reserve released from last period | $1,200 |
| Deposit to your bank | $11,860 |
A few lines deserve a closer look.
Referral fees. Amazon charges a percentage of each sale, and 15% is the most common rate, with most categories carrying a $0.30 minimum per item. The Professional plan costs $39.99 a month.
FBA fees. If Amazon picks, packs and ships your orders, those fulfillment fees come out of the settlement. Storage fees appear too, usually monthly.
Sales tax. All states with a sales tax have marketplace facilitator laws, so Amazon collects and remits tax on most of your marketplace sales. It shows up as money in and money out. Record both sides so your sales aren’t inflated, but don’t record it as tax you owe.
Reserves. The held amount moves to a receivable from Amazon. When it’s released, the receivable comes back down.
How do you book a settlement in QuickBooks?
The principle is the same as any marketplace: record the gross activity, then let the deposit be the net result.
- Download the settlement flat file for the period.
- Summarize by type. Group every line into sales, shipping income, refunds, referral fees, FBA fees, storage, advertising, promotions, reimbursements, tax and reserves.
- Post one journal entry or sales receipt per settlement, with each group going to its own account. Connector tools like A2X automate this step.
- Match the net to the bank deposit. They should agree to the cent.
- Split settlements that cross month-end. Allocate the sales and fees to the month they belong to, so December’s P&L holds December’s activity.
- Reconcile the reserve. Your receivable from Amazon should equal what Amazon shows as held.
What about inventory and cost of goods?
The settlement report tells you what you sold and what Amazon charged. It doesn’t tell you what the products cost you. To see true margin, you need cost of goods sold for each unit, including what you paid the supplier and what it cost to get stock into Amazon’s warehouses.
Without it, a month with strong sales and high FBA fees can look profitable when it wasn’t. Track inventory you’ve sent to FBA as an asset until it sells, then move its cost to COGS.
How do you split a settlement that crosses month-end?
Because settlements run on a roughly two-week cycle, at least one each month straddles the month-end. Here’s an illustrative settlement from December 24 to January 7.
| Line | December 24 to 31 | January 1 to 7 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product sales | $9,600 | $5,400 | $15,000 |
| Referral fees | −$1,440 | −$810 | −$2,250 |
| FBA fees | −$1,540 | −$860 | −$2,400 |
| Refunds | −$300 | −$520 | −$820 |
| Net | $6,320 | $3,210 | $9,530 |
The deposit for $9,530 arrives in January. But $6,320 of that activity belongs to December. Record the December portion in December, with a receivable from Amazon for the net. In January, record the January portion and clear the receivable when the deposit lands.
Most connector tools can split settlements by date automatically. If you’re doing it by hand, filter the flat file by posted date and summarize each month separately.
How do FBA inventory, removals and reimbursements work in the books?
FBA adds inventory movements that never pass through your own warehouse, and each one has a bookkeeping consequence.
Inventory sent to FBA. When you ship stock into Amazon’s network, it’s still your inventory. Move it from your warehouse location to an FBA location in your inventory records, at cost. The inbound shipping cost belongs in the landed cost of that stock.
Units sold. When an FBA unit sells, its cost moves from inventory to cost of goods sold, just like a sale from your own shelves.
Removals and disposals. If you ask Amazon to return or dispose of stock, you’ll pay a removal fee. Returned units go back into your inventory. Disposed units should be written off, so your inventory isn’t overstated.
Lost or damaged inventory. Amazon may reimburse you for units it lost or damaged. Record the reimbursement to its own account and write off the cost of the lost units. Reimbursements often don’t cover the full retail value, so tracking both sides shows what the loss really cost.
Long-term storage. Units that sit too long can incur extra storage fees. Those fees are a signal to review slow-moving stock, not just a cost to absorb.
Where does Amazon advertising belong?
Sponsored Products and other Amazon ads can be paid two ways: deducted from your settlement or charged to a credit card. The bookkeeping is the same either way. Advertising is an expense, recorded in the month the ads ran.
The catch is consistency. If some months are deducted from settlements and others hit a credit card, it’s easy to record them twice or not at all. Pick one payment method if you can, and give Amazon advertising its own account, separate from Meta or Google ads, so you can measure it against Amazon sales.
What about multiple marketplaces or currencies?
If you sell on Amazon in more than one country, each marketplace produces its own settlements, often in its own currency.
- Treat each marketplace as a separate channel, with its own sales, fee and reserve accounts or classes.
- Record foreign-currency settlements at the rate on the settlement date, or use a consistent monthly rate as your accountant advises.
- Track currency conversion fees charged when Amazon converts your proceeds to dollars.
- Reconcile each marketplace’s reserves against what Seller Central shows for that marketplace.
Mixing marketplaces in one set of accounts makes it impossible to tell which country is profitable.
Your monthly Amazon reconciliation checklist
- Download every settlement flat file that touches the month
- Summarize each settlement into sales, fees, refunds, ads, reimbursements, tax and reserves
- Split settlements that cross month-end by posted date
- Match every settlement’s net to its bank deposit
- Update the receivable from Amazon for reserves and unpaid balances
- Record inventory sent to FBA, sold, removed and lost
- Record reimbursements and write off the related units
- Confirm Amazon ads are recorded once, in the month they ran
- Compare sales in your books to Seller Central’s sales for the month
What to do when a settlement doesn’t tie out
A settlement should match its deposit to the cent. When it doesn’t, the cause is usually one of these.
| If you see | Likely cause | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| Deposit lower than the settlement total | A reserve held back, or a balance carried to the next period | The reserve and unavailable balance lines |
| No deposit at all | A negative balance, or a hold on the account | Account Health and the payments dashboard |
| Sales in your books lower than Seller Central | A settlement missed or posted to the wrong month | Every settlement that touches the month |
| Fees far higher than usual | Storage or removal fees, or long-term storage charges | The fee types in the flat file |
| Unexplained small credits | Reimbursements for lost or damaged inventory | Reimbursement lines and your inventory records |
| Advertising counted twice | Ads deducted from the settlement and charged to a card | How each month’s ads were paid |
Start with the reserve, because it’s the most common reason a deposit differs from a settlement’s activity. Then check whether a settlement crosses month-end and was posted to only one month.
If you sell in more than one Amazon marketplace, make sure you’re matching each settlement to the right bank account and currency. A US settlement and a Canadian one can arrive within days of each other, and they’re easy to mix up.
When a gap remains, resist the urge to post a balancing entry. An unexplained difference in an Amazon account usually points to a fee type you haven’t mapped yet, and finding it once fixes every future month.
How does this look in practice?
Take an illustrative kitchenware seller doing about $120,000 a month on Amazon through FBA. For two years, the seller’s books recorded each settlement deposit as sales, and storage fees were paid without anyone looking at them.
Breaking the settlements apart changed the picture. Referral fees and FBA fees together came to roughly a third of sales, which the owner knew in principle but had never seen month by month. Storage fees had tripled over the summer because one slow-moving product had been overstocked. And Amazon had sent several reimbursements for lost units that had been recorded as sales.
With the costs visible, the decisions were straightforward. The slow product was put on a removal order and relisted at a lower price, storage dropped back, and reimbursements went to their own account so the seller could track how often inventory went missing.
The settlement report had held all of this information the whole time. It only became useful once each line was posted to its own account and the settlements were split by month.
When is it time to hand this off?
Reconciling Amazon settlements is learnable, and many sellers do it themselves for a while. A few signs suggest the work has outgrown a spare evening:
- You sell in more than one marketplace or currency, and settlements arrive from several countries.
- Settlements cross month-end every month and you’re not sure each month holds its own sales.
- Reserves, reimbursements and removals appear often enough that inventory and cash no longer tie out.
- Your accountant asks for adjustments at year-end that you can’t easily explain.
- You’d rather spend the time on product and growth than on flat files.
Whoever does the work, the standard is the same: every settlement split into its parts, matched to the bank and closed each month, so your Amazon numbers are something you can plan from.
Key terms
- Settlement period: the roughly two-week window of activity Amazon groups into one payout.
- Settlement flat file: the detailed downloadable report listing every transaction in a settlement.
- Referral fee: Amazon’s percentage of each sale, set by category.
- FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon): Amazon storing, packing and shipping your orders for a fee.
- Account level reserve: funds Amazon holds back to cover returns, chargebacks and claims.
- Reimbursement: a payment from Amazon for inventory it lost or damaged.
- Marketplace facilitator: a marketplace that collects and remits sales tax on sellers’ behalf.
- Disbursement: the transfer of settled funds from Amazon to your bank.
What are the most common Amazon bookkeeping mistakes?
- Recording deposits as sales. It hides more than a third of your activity in the example above.
- Booking marketplace tax as revenue. Sales look bigger than they were.
- Treating reserves as fees. You understate profit and lose track of money owed to you.
- Ignoring reimbursements. Amazon pays you back for lost or damaged inventory. Those payments need their own account.
- Letting settlements cross months unsplit. Monthly trends stop meaning anything.
If you’re weighing whether to hand this work off, our guide to the best accounting services for Amazon sellers compares the options.
FAQs
How often does Amazon pay sellers?
Once your account is settled with a positive balance, about every 14 days. Transfers can take up to five business days to reach your bank.
Why is my Amazon deposit lower than my sales?
Referral fees, FBA fees, refunds, advertising, subscription fees and reserves are all deducted before the deposit.
Do I owe sales tax on Amazon marketplace sales?
In most cases Amazon collects and remits it under marketplace facilitator laws. You should still record it so your sales figures are accurate. Sales through your own site are a separate question.
Is an account level reserve an expense?
No. It’s your money held by Amazon, so it’s a receivable until it’s released.
How do I record Amazon reimbursements?
Record the reimbursement to its own income or contra-expense account, and write off the cost of the lost or damaged units from inventory.
Is inventory at an Amazon warehouse still my inventory?
Yes. Track it as inventory in an FBA location until it sells, is removed or is written off.
Should Amazon ads be paid from my settlement or a card?
Either works for the books. Pick one so ads aren’t recorded twice, and keep Amazon advertising on its own line.
How do I handle a settlement that spans two months?
Split it by posted date. Record each month’s activity in that month, using a receivable from Amazon for the part not yet paid.
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