How to reconcile your Amazon payouts

Why your payout never matches your sales

Every Amazon seller hits the same moment. The dashboard shows a healthy month of sales, the money lands in the bank, and the two numbers are nowhere near each other. Usually the gap is legitimate. Amazon takes its fees, refunds go out, and some cash is held back for a while. Sometimes it isn't, though. A fee is charged at the wrong rate, a returned unit never comes back, or a lost unit is never reimbursed.

Reconciliation is how you tell the two apart. You take each payout, break it into the transactions behind it, and confirm that every line is one you expected. Done once a month, it is the most reliable way to find money Amazon owes you and to know your real margin.

What you will be able to do

• Explain the gap between gross sales and the amount deposited in any period.
• Read a settlement report and group its lines into a few clear buckets.
• Match orders to payouts and spot the ones that were never paid.
• Find refunds, lost units and fee errors worth raising with Amazon.

How an Amazon settlement works

Amazon does not pay you per order. It collects money from customers into your seller account balance, deducts what you owe it, and transfers the remainder on a fixed settlement cycle. The cycle depends on your marketplace and account, and it rarely lines up with calendar months.

That one fact explains most of the confusion. A payout covers the transactions that settled in its window, not the orders placed in it. An order placed on the 30th can be paid in next month's settlement. A refund for an order from three weeks ago can land in this one.

The three moving parts

• Settlement period. The window of transactions a payout covers. Each one has a start date, an end date and a settlement ID.
• Reserve. Amazon may hold back part of your balance. The common reasons are covering possible refunds and A-to-z claims, or a delivery-date-based hold before funds are released. The held amount shows as a deduction in one settlement and comes back as a credit in a later one.
• Transfer. The amount actually sent to your bank. Bank processing can add a few days between the end of the settlement and the money arriving.

Reading the settlement report

Everything you need is in the settlement report. In Seller Central, open Reports → Payments. The statement view shows a summary of each settlement. For line-level detail, download the transaction view or the flat-file settlement report for the same period.

A settlement file can run to thousands of rows, but every row belongs to one of a few types. Column names vary slightly by marketplace and report version. The groups below hold across all of them.

A settlement, summarised

Group every line into those buckets and the payout stops looking random. Here is one settlement period laid out that way.

Illustrative numbers for one settlement period.

Sales of ₹4.8 lakh became a deposit of ₹3.05 lakh, and every rupee of the difference has a label. That is the goal of reconciliation. A gap with no label is the one you need to investigate.

The fees to check line by line

Most fee lines are correct. The ones that are wrong tend to be wrong the same way every time, so a few targeted checks find most of the errors.

Referral fee

This is Amazon's commission on each sale, usually a percentage of the item price that depends on the category. Check the effective rate per SKU: referral fee divided by item price. If a SKU's rate doesn't match its category's published rate, the product may be in the wrong category.

Fulfilment fee

For FBA orders, this is a per-unit fee based on the product's size and weight. If Amazon measures a unit as larger or heavier than it is, every order of that SKU is overcharged. Compare the fee per unit across months. A sudden step up with no change to the product is the signal to request a re-measurement.

Storage and long-term storage

Monthly storage is charged on the space your inventory occupies. Stock that sits too long attracts an additional aged-inventory surcharge. These lines rarely contain errors, but they often point to slow stock you should remove or discount.

Refund administration

When you refund an order, Amazon returns most of the referral fee but may keep a refund administration charge. Check that the referral fee credit appears against each refund line.

Matching orders to the payout

The fee checks tell you whether you were charged correctly. Order matching tells you whether you were paid for everything you shipped. It is a join between two exports on one shared column: the Amazon order ID.

1. Export your orders. Download an orders report for the period, with order ID, SKU, quantity, item price and ship date.
2. Export the settlements. Download every settlement that overlaps the period, plus the next one, since late orders are paid there.
3. Join on order ID. For each shipped order, pull in the matching settlement lines. A lookup in a spreadsheet works for small volumes. A pivot or a database works better above a few thousand orders.
4. Compare amounts. The item price on the order should match the principal on the settlement line, before fees.
5. List the exceptions. These are orders shipped with no settlement line, orders paid at a different amount, and settlement lines with no matching order.

Most exceptions are timing. The order shipped near the end of the period and will be paid next time. Mark these as pending and recheck them next month. Anything still unpaid after two cycles deserves a closer look.

Refunds, returns and reimbursements

This is where most recoverable money hides. For FBA sellers, Amazon handles the physical inventory, so it also owns most of the ways that inventory goes missing.

Refunded but not returned

When a customer asks for a return, Amazon often refunds them before the item comes back. If the item never arrives back at the fulfilment centre within Amazon's window, you are generally eligible for a reimbursement. To find these cases, match refund lines in your settlements against your customer returns report by order ID. A refund with no matching return, past the window, is a candidate.

Returned but not restocked

A return can arrive back and be marked as damaged or unsellable. Check the disposition on your returns report. Units marked as damaged by the carrier or the warehouse are treated differently from units the customer damaged.

Lost and damaged in the warehouse

Inventory can be lost or damaged inside Amazon's network. Amazon reimburses many of these cases automatically. Compare your inventory reconciliation or ledger report against the reimbursements report to see which ones it paid and which ones it missed.

A monthly reconciliation routine

Reconciliation pays off when it is a habit, not a rescue job at year end. This routine fits in an afternoon once your exports are set up.

• Download every settlement that closed this month, plus the transaction detail.
• Group lines into orders, refunds, fees, adjustments, advertising, tax and reserve.
• Confirm the grouped total equals the amount that reached your bank.
• Check the effective referral rate and fulfilment fee per unit for your top SKUs.
• Join shipped orders to settlement lines and list orders still unpaid.
• Match refunds to returns and list refunds with no return past the window.
• Compare inventory ledger losses against reimbursements received.
• Open support cases for anything confirmed, and log the case IDs.
• Carry pending items forward and recheck them next month.

Keep the log. Over a few months it shows which issues repeat, and repeated issues usually trace back to one listing, one SKU's dimensions or one category setting you can fix at the source.

When to stop doing it by hand

The spreadsheet method works. It also scales badly. Settlement files grow with your order count, multi-item orders complicate every join, and each new marketplace or account adds another set of exports to keep in step.

A few signs you have outgrown the manual routine:

• The monthly check takes longer than a working day.
• You skip months, so claims age past the window.
• You manage several accounts or client accounts and can't reconcile all of them.
• Your finance team and your ads team quote different profit numbers for the same month.

At that point, a tool that pulls settlements directly from Amazon and does the matching for you saves more than it costs. Whichever route you take, the logic in this guide stays the same: every rupee of the gap should have a label.