The deposit Amazon sends to your bank account is not your revenue. It is the net result of everything that happened during that settlement period: gross product sales, FBA fees, referral fees, refunds, reimbursements, advertising charges, storage fees, and sometimes a reserve holdback. Amazon bundles all of that together and sends you a single number. That number will almost never match what you see in your Seller Central sales dashboard.

This is where most Amazon sellers get confused. They see $8,000 in sales for the period but only $5,200 hits the bank. The difference is all the line items Amazon netted out before paying you. If you record $5,200 as revenue, you are understating your sales and missing thousands of dollars in deductible business expenses like FBA fulfillment fees, referral commissions, and storage costs. If you record $8,000 as revenue but don’t account for the fees separately, your profit and loss statement won’t reflect reality either.

The right approach is to break each settlement into its components. Download the settlement report from Seller Central and you will see every transaction that made up the deposit. Gross sales go to revenue. Each fee category goes to its own expense account. Refunds reduce revenue. Reimbursements for lost or damaged inventory get recorded separately. The net of all those entries should equal the bank deposit exactly.

Doing this manually works when you have a handful of settlements per month. Once you scale past a few hundred orders, manual reconciliation becomes painfully slow and error-prone. A single miscategorized line can throw off your entire reconciliation. Tools like A2X or Webgility connect to your Amazon account and your accounting software, then automatically parse each settlement report into a summary journal entry with the correct accounts mapped. The journal entry debits your bank account for the net deposit and breaks out gross revenue, fees, refunds, and other components into their proper accounts.

If you use QuickBooks Online, A2X integrates directly and posts these entries for you. You still need to review them, but the heavy lifting of parsing hundreds of individual transactions into clean categories is handled. The settlement total in QuickBooks will match your bank deposit, and your income statement will show real gross revenue alongside real fee expenses.

One thing to watch for is reserve holds. Amazon sometimes withholds a portion of your settlement as a reserve, especially for newer accounts or during high-return periods. That money hasn’t left Amazon yet, so it shouldn’t show as a deposit. It needs to sit in a receivable or clearing account until Amazon actually releases it. Missing this creates a reconciliation gap that is hard to track down later.

Getting this right from the start saves you from a painful catch-up bookkeeping project down the road. Many Amazon sellers run for a year or two recording just the net deposits as income and then discover at tax time that their books are essentially useless for understanding profitability or filing accurate returns.

If you sell on Amazon and want your books to reflect what is actually happening in your business, proper settlement reconciliation is not optional. Our bilingual bookkeeping services help e-commerce sellers in Central Florida and beyond set up the right processes so every settlement period closes clean and your numbers tell you the truth about your margins.