Amazon settlements, reconciled without tears
Amazon pays you a net number: sales minus refunds minus a dozen fee types minus reserves. Posting that one deposit as 'revenue' poisons your margin truth. Here is the honest structure.
1. Understand the document
A settlement covers a period: orders, refunds, FBA fees, referral fees, storage, advertising, reserve movements. Every one is a different account in your books.
2. Post the components, not the net
Gross sales to revenue, refunds against it, each fee family to its expense account, reserves to a receivable-like holding. The net equals the deposit — that is the check.
3. Match the deposit
The settlement's net posts as the deposit the bank receives, so the bank reconciliation ticks one line against one line.
4. Or let it post itself
SeroBooks pulls settlements from Amazon automatically, maps every fee to your accounts, flags anything unmappable in an issues queue, and has been verified against a real seller's books to the penny. The manual knowledge above is still worth having — it is what the automation is doing.
Two halves, or the books are wrong
Marketplace money is orders and settlements. Orders say what sold, where, and with what tax. Settlements say what was actually deposited and what it cost to get there — commission, fulfilment, storage, advertising and the tax on those fees. Books carrying only orders show a profit you did not make.
Both must be posted, for the same periods, or the clearing account will never empty.
The clearing account is the tell
A marketplace clearing account should rise as sales post and fall as payouts arrive. One that only ever climbs is holding the first half of the money and none of the second, which is the single most common marketplace bookkeeping failure — and a ten-second check.
Each settlement should tie to exactly one deposit on the bank statement. Reconcile every payout and year-end is an afternoon; skip them and it is a forensic week.
What SeroBooks does with this
Settlements pull read-only, fees map to accounts with unmapped descriptions parked visibly in a holding account, orders are enriched with their ship-to province before posting so place-of-supply tax is correct, and then both halves post — invoices and settlement journals — into the same ledger.
The whole path, including the QuickBooks bridge behind it, was reconciled account-for-account against a real production seller's company file.
See it in your own numbers.
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