How to reconcile an Amazon payout to your orders

Every two weeks Amazon pays you a single amount. It is not your sales for the fortnight, it is not your sales minus fees, and it is rarely a round number. Reconciling it means proving that the money in the bank equals a known list of orders, refunds and charges, so that your books show revenue and fees for the right orders and nothing is counted twice or missed. Done properly it takes about twenty minutes per payout. Done by "booking the deposit as sales", it quietly overstates revenue and hides fees.

What a settlement report is

Amazon's settlement cycle is normally 14 days. At the end of each cycle Amazon closes a settlement, works out the balance, holds back a reserve and transfers the rest. The transfer usually reaches a UK bank account within three to five working days. Amazon generates a settlement report for each closed cycle; you cannot request one, but you can download them from Payments > Reports repository (choose Flat File V2) or fetch them through the Selling Partner API as report type GET_V2_SETTLEMENT_REPORT_DATA_FLAT_FILE_V2.

The file is tab-separated. The first row carries the settlement itself: settlement-id, settlement-start-date, settlement-end-date, deposit-date, total-amount and currency. Every other row is one amount, described by these columns:

A single sold unit therefore appears as several rows: a Principal of £25.00, a Commission of −£3.75, a FBAPerUnitFulfillmentFee of −£3.09 and so on. The sum of every row in the file equals total-amount, which is the first thing to check.

Why the total never matches your sales

If you add up the orders placed between the start and end dates you will not get the payout. Seven things sit between the two:

1. Timing. An order is posted when it ships, not when it is placed, so orders from the last days of the previous cycle land in this one, and this cycle's unshipped orders land in the next.
2. The reserve. Amazon holds funds until about seven days after delivery to cover refunds and claims. The report shows the previous reserve coming back in and the new reserve going out as two account-level rows. In a growing business the new reserve is always bigger than the old one, so the payout is less than the period's earnings.
3. Refunds from earlier cycles. A refund is posted when it is processed. The Principal comes back as a negative, the commission is refunded to you minus the administration fee (20% of it, capped at £5), and the fulfilment fee stays with Amazon.
4. Charges with no order. Monthly storage, the Professional subscription, aged-inventory surcharges, removal orders and inbound placement fees are posted against the account, not an order. Advertising is often here too, as Cost of Advertising rows, unless you pay for ads by card.
5. Reimbursements and adjustments. Lost or damaged stock paid back by Amazon, SAFE-T claim decisions and fee corrections appear as Adjustment or other-transaction rows.
6. VAT. Prices include VAT, so the Principal is gross. Fees carry 20% VAT for UK-established sellers, which sits in separate rows or in the tax columns of the newer report, depending on the store.
7. Currency. A payout from a non-UK store is converted at Amazon's rate on the deposit date, so the bank amount differs from the report's total-amount in the store currency.

Step by step

1. Check the file against itself. Sum the amount column (ignoring the header row). It must equal total-amount. If it does not, the file was truncated or a decimal comma was read as thousands.

2. Split by transaction type. Three piles: rows with an order-id and type Order; rows with an order-id and type Refund; everything else.

3. Match orders. For each order-id, sum the ItemPrice rows (Principal, Shipping, gift wrap) and the ItemFees rows separately. Compare the ItemPrice total to the order in your own records; they must agree to the penny. Any order in the report that you do not have is a missing import; any shipped order you have that is not in the report either shipped after the end date or is in the reserve and will appear next time.

4. Match refunds. Each Refund row group should correspond to a return or a refund you authorised. Book the negative Principal as a sales reversal and the RefundCommission as a fee credit; the difference between the commission you paid and the commission you got back is the administration fee, which is a real cost of that return.

5. Book the account-level rows. Storage, subscriptions, advertising, reimbursements and adjustments each go to their own expense or income account, dated by posted-date. These are the lines that disappear when someone books "the deposit as sales".

6. Treat the reserve as a receivable, not a loss. The previous reserve returning is money you already recognised; the new reserve is money you have earned but not received. Both stay in the Amazon receivable account. Do not expense them.

7. Prove the bank. Net sales minus fees minus refunds plus adjustments minus the net reserve movement equals total-amount, and total-amount (converted if necessary) equals the bank deposit on or just after deposit-date. Any difference is a currency gain or loss, or a bank charge, and is booked as such.

A small example

A 14-day settlement for a seller with £8,000 of sales in the period might reconcile like this:

Booking the £4,770.14 as revenue would understate sales by £3,444 and show no fees at all. Booking £8,000 of sales from the order list would overstate revenue by £214.60 and miss the refunds. Only the row-by-row reconciliation gives the right revenue (£8,214.60), the right fees (£2,955.16) and a receivable from Amazon of £1,295.00 that will come back next cycle.

Keeping it quick

• Reconcile every settlement, not every month. A settlement is a closed unit with a known total; a calendar month straddles two or three of them.
• Keep the Amazon receivable as its own account. Its balance should always equal the current reserve plus unsettled shipped orders, which is a useful sanity check.
• Keep per-order fees on the order. Account-level charges are fine as monthly expense lines, but commission and fulfilment belong to the order they came from, or your profit per product is wrong.
• Watch posted-date, not the order date, when deciding which period a line belongs to.

Merchvio imports each settlement file, matches the rows to the orders and returns it already holds, posts the account-level lines to the accounts you chose, and shows the unmatched remainder, which is usually a handful of rows rather than the whole file.

The report columns and payment timings above were checked against Amazon's developer documentation and public seller guidance in October 2026. Reserve periods and payout timing depend on your account's history and can change; the report itself is always the source of truth.