Amazon FBA Bookkeeping: The DIY Monthly Close From Amazon’s Own Reports
You can do Amazon FBA bookkeeping with nothing but a spreadsheet, and the file you need is the Date Range Transaction report (CSV) in Seller Central’s Reports Repository — not the payout statement. Pull one calendar month, split its columns into revenue, contra-revenue, tax liability, and three separate fee buckets, then post one journal entry with the deposit total as the balancing line. That is the method. Below: every column and where it lands, how COGS attaches, and how reimbursements and their reversals get posted without double-counting. All report names, columns, and paths are quoted from Amazon’s public Seller Central help pages, checked 2026-09-03.
The Three Amazon Reports This Process Runs On
Most DIY bookkeeping errors start by opening the wrong one of these.
Date Range Transaction report (CSV) — Amazon: “a detailed list of the transactions that occurred in your seller account during a specific date range.” This is the workhorse: one row per transaction, fees already split into columns.
Date Range Summary report (PDF) — “an overview of income, expenses, taxes, and fund transfers in your seller account during a specific date range.” Use it as a check figure, not as the source.
Reimbursements report — “provides itemized details for all reimbursements, including those requested by you and those that are generated automatically.”
Behind all three sits the settlement statement on the All Statements page. It is a payout document, and it is the one report you should not build books from.
Settlement Reports vs. Date Range Reports
Amazon settles this in one sentence, verbatim: “Settlement reports reflect payout timing. Date Range reports reflect activity timing.”
That distinction decides the whole close. Settlement periods run roughly two weeks and never align with calendar months, so a settlement-based close pushes part of March into February and leaves stub periods at both ends. Amazon states the Date Range reports “are separate from the settlement reports or statements that are available on the All Statements page, which provide details on your payouts within a settlement cycle.”
Build the books on activity timing; use payouts only to reconcile the bank. Amazon lists “Support accrual accounting and sales to earnings-reconciliation workflows” as one of the report’s stated purposes.
Step 1: Pull the Month From the Reports Repository
Amazon’s documented path, quoted: “From the drop-down menu in Seller Central, select Payments and then select Reports Repository.”
- Select the account type, or All for a unified report across account types.
- Choose Transaction report (CSV). Request the Summary PDF too — one extra click, a second set of totals.
- Choose Month, which “will generate a report from the first to the end of the selected month.”
- Click Request report.
Three limits before you plan a catch-up: reports “can be generated for up to 365 days at a time, going as far back as 2012,” and generation “can take up to three hours.” If a request returns Failed, Amazon’s own fixes are to re-request it, split it into shorter date ranges, or split it by account type.
Step 2: Map Each Column to an Accounting Bucket
This is where DIY bookkeeping is won or lost. Amazon has already done the categorisation — the columns are your chart of accounts, if you stop collapsing them.
| Transaction report column | Amazon’s description (2026-09-03) | Common treatment |
|---|---|---|
| Product sales | “the amount of your sales for the product” | Gross revenue |
| Shipping credits | “the amount that buyers paid for shipping” | Revenue, tracked separately |
| Gift wrap credits | “the amount that buyers paid for gift wrap” | Revenue, tracked separately |
| Promotional rebate | “deducted from your account balance for promotional offerings” | Contra-revenue, not expense |
| Product sales tax | “the sales tax collected from buyers for product sales” | Liability, never revenue |
| Shipping credits tax | “the sales tax collected from buyers for shipping” | Liability, never revenue |
| Gift wrap credits tax | “the sales tax collected from buyers for gift wrap” | Liability, never revenue |
| Marketplace withheld tax | “for Amazon to remit per Marketplace Tax Collection rules” | Clears that liability |
| Selling fees | “including variable closing fees and referral fees” | Selling expense |
| FBA fees | “the fees charged for order fulfillment” | Fulfillment expense |
| Other transaction fees | “sales tax collection fees, per-item fees, and referral fees” | Selling expense |
| Other | “other adjustments to your account such as disbursements” | Split by transaction (Step 4) |
| Total | “the change in your seller balance as a result of the transaction” | Amazon clearing account |
Three notes that prevent most errors:
Keep Selling fees and FBA fees apart. Selling fees are what the marketplace charges for access; FBA fees are what the warehouse charges for labour. Merge them and you can no longer tell a channel problem from a logistics problem. Rate cards: Amazon seller fees and referral fees by category.
Marketplace withheld tax is not an expense. It is Amazon remitting tax you already collected from the buyer. Booking it as cost understates profit.
Non-order fees never appear on an order row. Storage, long-term storage, removals, and subscription charges arrive as separate transactions with no Order ID. Amazon’s Payments Summary groups these under FBA Fees as “non-order fees such as storage of inventory at our fulfillment centers, removal order, and reimbursement and balance adjustments.” Storage is seasonal — see FBA storage fees.
Reports generated after Amazon’s February–March 2026 reporting rollout may carry two extra columns for accounts under delivery date–based reserve policies: Transaction status (deferred or released) and Transaction release date. Amazon states “each transaction appears once, based on its posted date” and “deferred status does not result in double counting” — filter on it for cash-timing questions, not to re-split revenue.
Step 3: Attach COGS to Units Sold, Not to Purchases
No Amazon report knows what your inventory cost. That is the one number you supply.
The rule is unforgiving: paying a supplier buys an asset, not an expense. It sits in Inventory until the unit sells; only then does the cost move to COGS.
The Transaction report supplies the trigger — SKU and Quantity on every order row:
- Filter to rows where Type is an order.
- Pivot Quantity by SKU for the month.
- Multiply each SKU’s units by its landed unit cost (supplier invoice plus freight, duty, and inbound shipping, divided by units received).
- Sum it. That is the month’s COGS, and the same figure leaves Inventory.
Refunds run backwards: a returned unit that comes back sellable reduces COGS and restores Inventory. A unit refunded but never returned does not. Landed cost also drives unit economics — see FBA fees and profit.
Step 4: Post Reimbursements and Their Reversals
Reimbursements are the most double-counted item in DIY Amazon books, because they appear twice.
They land in the Reimbursements report and again in the transaction data. Amazon gives the exact route to find one on the payments side: in the Payments dashboard, click Transaction view, set Filter view by to Other, and search the Product Details column for Balance Adjustment or FBA Inventory Reimbursement. Amazon’s Payments Summary confirms the same amounts sit inside the Sales “Other” line, which “includes, but is not limited to, FBA inventory reimbursements and gift wrap credits.”
The rule that keeps books clean: post from the transaction data, use the Reimbursements report to explain it.
Three field-level details that change how you post:
quantity-reimbursed-cashandquantity-reimbursed-inventoryare different events. Cash is money in. Inventory reimbursement is Amazon replacing units — no cash moves, and the treatment is a quantity adjustment, not income.original-reimbursement-idandoriginal-reimbursement-typesignal a reversal. They identify “the original reimbursement request that is being adjusted,” and the clawback usually lands months after the original credit.- Timing lags. Amazon states reimbursements appear in your account 4–5 business days after approval, can take up to five days to appear in the report, and that multiple reimbursements processed the same day for the same issue “may be combined into a single transaction.” Some claims will straddle your month-end cut-off; that is expected.
Matching the two lists by hand gets tedious past a few dozen rows a month. ReimburseOps reads the exported FBA Reimbursements CSV and flags rows that look short against your sourcing cost or inconsistent against similar events for the same FNSKU; free tier, $19/month Pro, no Seller Central connection, and it does not file claims for you (checked 2026-08-27). For claim windows and valuation, see the FBA reimbursement guide.
Step 5: Tie the Month Out
A close is finished when three independent numbers agree.
- Report to journal. Your revenue, contra-revenue, tax liability, and fee lines must sum to the Total column for the period — Amazon defines Total as “the change in your seller balance as a result of the transaction.”
- Journal to Summary PDF. A gap here almost always means a dropped column or a filtered-out adjustment row.
- Clearing account to bank. Deposits reduce the Amazon clearing account; the remainder is Amazon’s held balance and should match your Payments dashboard.
If 1 and 2 agree but 3 does not, the problem is timing, not classification. Amazon’s Statement View defines Beginning Balance as the amount “reserved at the end of the previous statement period to cover chargebacks, refunds, or fees” — usually the missing piece.
Common Mistakes in DIY Amazon FBA Bookkeeping
- Booking the deposit as revenue. A $9,400 payout is gross sales minus fees, refunds, advertising, and withheld tax. This single shortcut hides both revenue and expenses.
- Treating collected sales tax as income. It is a liability from the moment it is collected.
- Expensing supplier payments on the date paid. That is a purchase, not a cost of sale.
- Counting a reimbursement twice, once from each report.
- Closing on settlement periods, which guarantees no month matches a calendar month.
- Ignoring reversals, which overstate income in every month after the clawback lands.
Keep Doing This Manually, Buy Software, or Hire an Accountant?
The method above holds up longer than most people expect. The honest boundary:
Stay manual while you are single-marketplace, single-currency, under roughly a few hundred orders a month, with a stable fee mix. The close is a download, a pivot, and one journal entry — under an hour once the template exists. No software makes an hour a month cheaper.
Move to software when the work stops being mechanical: multiple marketplaces or currencies, inventory large enough to need real valuation, or more adjustment rows than you can eyeball. Connectors post these same buckets into a ledger automatically and keep the mapping consistent over years. Options are compared in Amazon accounting software.
Bring in an accountant when the questions become treatment questions — valuation method, multi-state or cross-border registration, entity structure, or preparing books for a sale or a lender. Software records what happened; it does not decide how something should be treated. See ecommerce accountants for Amazon sellers for how they charge and how to screen one, and 1099-K and seller taxes for what Amazon reports about you either way.
These are not stages you pass through in order — plenty of sellers run a manual close plus a specialist accountant, with no software in between.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which Amazon report should I use for monthly bookkeeping?
The Date Range Transaction report (CSV) from Payments → Reports Repository. Amazon states that “Settlement reports reflect payout timing. Date Range reports reflect activity timing,” and monthly books need activity timing (checked 2026-09-03).
How far back can I pull Amazon transaction reports?
Amazon’s help page states reports “can be generated for up to 365 days at a time, going as far back as 2012,” so a multi-year catch-up has to be requested year by year (checked 2026-09-03).
Do Amazon reimbursements count as income?
Cash reimbursements arrive as a credit in the transaction data and are commonly booked as other income or as a reduction of the related loss. Inventory reimbursements are different: the Reimbursements report separates quantity-reimbursed-cash from quantity-reimbursed-inventory, and replacement units involve no cash at all.
Why don’t my Amazon deposits match my sales?
A deposit is a net figure. Gross sales, refunds, referral and FBA fees, advertising, withheld tax, and reserve movements all sit between the two. The Total column reconciles them; the deposit alone never will.
The Bottom Line
Amazon already categorises your money — the Date Range Transaction report splits fees into three named buckets, isolates buyer-collected tax, and separates promotional rebates from expenses. DIY Amazon FBA bookkeeping is mostly the discipline of not collapsing those columns, supplying the one number Amazon lacks (landed unit cost), and refusing to book the deposit as revenue. Everything past that is volume — and volume is what software and accountants are for.
Verified against Amazon’s public Seller Central help pages on 2026-09-03: Payment Date Range Transaction and Summary reports, Payments Reports Repository, Reimbursements report, Payments Summary, Statement View.