Every two weeks, Amazon deposits a single number in your bank account. Inside that number: your sales, minus referral fees, FBA fees, storage, advertising, refunds, reimbursements and rolling reserves. Booking that deposit as "sales" is the single most common error in Amazon seller bookkeeping — and it quietly corrupts every report you run. Here's how to do it right.
What's actually inside an Amazon settlement
Open any settlement report in Seller Central and you'll find a dozen transaction types: orders, refunds, chargebacks, referral fees, FBA fulfillment fees, storage fees, advertising charges, reimbursements for lost inventory, and reserve movements. A $41,209 deposit might represent $52,000 of sales — or $38,000 of sales plus a reserve release. From the bank feed alone, you cannot tell the difference.
The right structure in QuickBooks Online
- Create dedicated accounts: Amazon Sales (income), Amazon Refunds (contra-income), Amazon Fees, FBA Fees, Amazon Advertising, and Amazon Reserve (an asset — money held, not lost).
- Use a settlement connector. A2X or Link My Books reads each settlement and posts a journal entry that splits it into those accounts — and matches the bank deposit to the penny. Manual splitting is possible for tiny sellers, but past ~100 orders a month it stops being realistic.
- Book reimbursements separately. Amazon regularly loses or damages inventory and reimburses you. Mixed into sales, they inflate revenue; tracked separately, they tell you whether you're recovering everything Amazon owes you.
- Track the reserve. Money Amazon holds back isn't an expense — it's your asset. Booking it wrong understates months where reserves grow and overstates months when they release.
Why this matters beyond tidiness
Settlement-level books give you three things deposit-level books never can: true gross margin (you know what Amazon really costs you), accurate taxes (fees are deductible — invisible fees are deductions you lose), and credibility — lenders and buyers re-build your numbers from settlements during diligence, and books that already match close faster.
Selling on Shopify or TikTok Shop too? Each channel has its own settlement logic — see our TikTok Shop bookkeeping guide for the messiest of the three.