Your Amazon Payout Isn’t Your Sales. Here’s What Sits in Between
You sold £12,000 on Amazon last month. Around £7,000 reached your bank. Where did the other £5,000 go?
It is the most common question I hear from Amazon sellers, and the answer is almost always in a report most sellers never open: the settlement report.
What a settlement is
Amazon does not pay you for each sale. It collects the money from customers, deducts its fees and anything else it is owed, and pays the balance to you in a single transfer, usually every two weeks. Each of those transfers is a settlement.
The settlement report lists every line that makes up that payout. A busy seller can have thousands of lines in a single settlement. Added together, they come to exactly what Amazon paid you.
What sits between your sales and your payout
The lines fall into a small number of groups:
- Sales — the price of the products, plus any shipping or gift wrap you charged
- Promotions — discounts and vouchers you funded
- Refunds — money returned to customers, often for sales made in an earlier settlement
- Referral fees — Amazon’s commission on each sale, usually a percentage of the price
- FBA fees — picking, packing and delivery if Amazon fulfils your orders
- Storage, removal and disposal fees
- Advertising — Sponsored Products and other campaigns, often deducted from the payout
- Subscription — the monthly Professional selling plan
- Reimbursements — money Amazon pays you for stock it lost or damaged
- Reserve — money Amazon holds back and releases in a later payout
Once you see the groups side by side, the gap between sales and payout usually stops being a mystery. Fees and advertising alone can take 30 to 50 percent of sales, depending on the product and how it is fulfilled.
Why the payout is not your sales or your profit
Many sellers record the bank receipt as their income. That understates sales, hides the fees completely and makes margins impossible to see. It also causes problems with VAT, because VAT is due on the full sale price, not on what Amazon pays you.
The payout is not your profit either. It leaves out what your stock cost you, any money still held in the reserve, and costs paid outside Amazon such as packaging, software and your accountant.
The correct approach is to record the settlement in full: sales as income, fees and advertising as costs, the reserve as money still owed to you, and only the net payout as the bank receipt.
How to download the report
- In Seller Central, go to Reports, then Payments, then All Statements.
- Find the settlement period you want.
- Click Download Flat File V2.
The file opens in Excel, but it is long and not designed to be read line by line. That is why we built a free Amazon settlement checker. Drop the file in and it groups every line, checks that the total agrees with your payout and shows how much Amazon kept. The file is read on your own device and never uploaded.
What to check each time
- Do the lines add up to the payout? If not, something is missing or has been counted twice.
- Is the fee percentage stable? A sudden rise often means a change in product size tier or a fee you did not expect.
- How much is in the reserve, and is it growing?
- Are refunds higher than usual, and for which products?
- Have reimbursements been paid for stock Amazon lost?
Getting it into your accounts
Each settlement should go into your bookkeeping software as one summarised entry, with each group posted to the right account and the correct VAT treatment. Tools such as A2X or Link My Books can automate this with Xero or QuickBooks, but they still need setting up and checking properly. A wrong mapping is repeated in every settlement.
Next: now that you know what a settlement is, work through what every line in it actually means.
If your Amazon figures have only ever been recorded as bank receipts, it is worth putting right before your next year end or VAT return. Book a consultation and we can look at where things stand.
