Last reviewed: September 2, 2026
A reserve is the part of an Amazon settlement you earned but were not paid. It gets its own line in the settlement report, it makes the deposit smaller than the trading behind it, and it is the most common reason a good month gets booked as a bad one. Below: the two lines as Amazon writes them, the one account they belong in, and a worked entry that still ties to the bank.
A reserve is money Amazon holds back on this statement and releases on a later one. It is not a fee, not revenue and not a loss. Nothing was earned or spent at the moment a reserve is taken: the cash sits with Amazon instead of with you for a few days or a few weeks, and then comes back.
Amazon holds reserves for ordinary reasons: a new account, a delivery-date hold on orders that have shipped but not arrived, a spike in claims, an account review. None of those changed what you sold or what it cost you.
In the Settlement Flat File V2 a reserve appears as two labels, and they are the only place the hold is visible.
| Line | What it does to this payout |
|---|---|
Current Reserve Amount | The money held back on this statement. It carries a negative amount, so it reduces the payout. In a real UK settlement this line reads -70.28. |
Previous Reserve Amount Balance | The release of what the last statement held. It carries a positive amount, so it increases the payout. In the same UK settlement it reads 70.28, the exact figure held two weeks earlier. |
Both arrive with transaction-type and amount-type set to other-transaction, and with no order id, no SKU and no quantity. That is not missing data: a reserve is an account-level movement, so there is no product it could honestly be attached to, and a tool that spreads it across SKUs is inventing a number. If the columns are unfamiliar, the settlement report explained walks the file field by field, and the glossary lists the reserve and transfer line types beside every other code.
Post a reserve as an expense and the month it is taken looks worse than it traded. Post the release as income and the month it returns looks better. Neither month is real, and because reserves move with order volume, the distortion is largest in the months you most want to read: a strong November holds more, so a strong November prints as a weak one.
The damage outlives the month, because every comparison afterwards carries the swing. A reserve belongs on the balance sheet, where a change in it means your money moved, not that you have less of it.
One account, on the balance sheet. In QuickBooks Online: New, Chart of accounts, Account type Other current assets, Detail type Other current assets, Name Amazon Reserved Balance. In Xero: Accounting, Chart of accounts, Add account, Account type Current Asset, the same name.
It is a current asset because the money is yours and Amazon owes it to you. Keep it beside the Amazon Clearing Account, not inside it. The clearing account exists to prove that one settlement equals one bank deposit, so it has to return to zero. A reserve deliberately does not, and merging the two destroys the only check the clearing account was there to give you.
One settlement, in GBP, with a reserve on both sides: 1,200.00 held this period, 450.00 released from the last one.
| Account | Type | Debit | Credit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Sales | Income | 9,840.00 | |
| Amazon Shipping Income | Income | 410.00 | |
| Amazon Sales Tax Collected | Other current liability | 1,968.00 | |
| Amazon Referral Fees | Expense | 1,476.00 | |
| Amazon FBA Fees | Expense | 2,214.50 | |
| Amazon Storage & Service Fees | Expense | 95.00 | |
| Amazon Reserved Balance | Other current asset | 750.00 | |
| Amazon Clearing Account | Bank / asset | 7,682.50 | |
| Totals | 12,218.00 | 12,218.00 |
The reserve row is one line, not two. 1,200.00 held and 450.00 released net to 750.00 moving into the reserve account, a debit because the asset grew. Had the release been the larger figure, the same account would carry a credit and the deposit would have been bigger than the trading. The memo on that line reads Reserve held or released, deliberately neutral: the sign carries the direction.
The clearing line is the test. 7,682.50 is what Amazon actually transferred, so the clearing debit must equal the bank line to the penny. Balance alone does not save you: debits equal credits at 12,218.00 whether or not the reserve was classified correctly. The same structure with every other line type in it is the full settlement journal entry.
The two labels are a pair across statements, not within one. This period's Previous Reserve Amount Balance releases what last period's Current Reserve Amount held, which is why the UK example above shows 70.28 out and 70.28 back with two weeks between them. Post both settlements and the account walks back toward zero on its own.
That gives you a running check for nothing. The closing balance on Amazon Reserved Balance should equal the last Current Reserve Amount you posted. If it climbs settlement after settlement, either Amazon has raised the hold, which Seller Central shows under Payments, or a release has been booked somewhere else.
Some sellers will look for these lines and find none. A practicing bookkeeper reviewing our mapping noted that Amazon now holds deferred transactions for high-turnover accounts rather than an account-level reserve, which changes how the deposit is timed. The money is still held, but against individual transactions that have not settled yet, so the settlement file carries no reserve line to book.
If that is your account, do not invent an entry. Create the account anyway and leave it empty: a reserve can appear the first month volumes or claims move.
Reserve lines stay out of SKU profit entirely, in the same family as disbursements and currency conversion: money that moves without being income or expense. A held reserve does not make a product unprofitable, and a released one does not rescue a bad one.
The temptation, when a reserve is large, is to allocate it across products so the SKU report adds up to the deposit. It should not add up to the deposit. Per-SKU margin answers what a product earns; the deposit answers what Amazon paid this fortnight, and the reserve is precisely the gap between the two questions.
Check the reserve first. It is the most common cause, because it is the one line that legitimately makes the deposit smaller than the trading, and the easiest to miss the first time it appears.
Check it per settlement, not per month. A month of books nets several settlements together, so a reserve taken in one and released in another cancels out and hides the error you are hunting. Compare one settlement's category totals against that settlement's own deposit. If the reserve is not the cause, why your Amazon deposit does not match works through the rest of the candidates in order.
The entry above is correct by hand, and it stays correct for as long as you are willing to split each settlement yourself. SkuSum builds it from the raw report: both reserve labels go to Amazon Reserved Balance, they stay out of SKU profit, and the clearing figure is there to check against your bank line. It runs locally in the browser, nothing is uploaded, and a line type it does not recognise blocks the export instead of being quietly absorbed. Run a settlement file and see what your reserve is doing.