Amazon settlement journal entry, line by line

Last reviewed: September 8, 2026

One settlement is one payout, and one payout is one journal entry. The figure Amazon deposits is what is left after product revenue, marketplace tax, referral fees, FBA fees, storage, ads, promotions, refunds, reserves and currency conversion have pulled in opposite directions. This page shows that entry in full, names the account every line type goes to, and gives the posting steps for QuickBooks Online and for Xero.

The numbers are sample data. The mapping was reviewed with practicing ecommerce bookkeepers and checked against real settlement files, and account names are editable, so nothing here forces you off your own chart of accounts.

Download the sample journal (CSV)

The journal entry for one settlement

The entry is dated the last posted date in the settlement and balances by construction: debits equal credits, and the balancing line is the deposit itself. Everything above the clearing row says where the money went, and the clearing row is what reaches the bank. For where the amounts come from, start with the settlement report itself.

Account	Type	Debit	Credit
Amazon Sales	Income		10,800.00
Amazon Sales Tax Collected conditional	Liability		-
Amazon Reimbursements conditional	Other income		-
Amazon Referral Fees	Expense	1,670.00
Amazon FBA Fees	Expense	2,470.00
Amazon Storage & Service Fees	Expense	110.00
Amazon Advertising conditional	Expense	-
Amazon Promotions conditional	Expense	-
Amazon Clearing Account	Bank / asset	6,550.00

Read it as 10,800.00 of product revenue, 4,250.00 of Amazon fees, and 6,550.00 landing in the bank. Nothing is collapsed into one net income line: once fees are netted into revenue neither figure can be checked again. The clearing account is what you reconcile against the actual bank transfer.

Which account each line type goes to

Amazon does not book money by account. It writes an amount-type and an amount-description on every row, and mapping those two strings to an account is the whole job. Fifteen categories cover it, in the order they are written into the entry, each with its default account and the memo that travels on the line.

A category with a positive net is credited and a negative one debited, so one rule handles both a fee and its refund. When the whole settlement nets negative, the clearing line flips to a credit.

The fee glossary lists every line type and where it belongs, from Principal and Commission through to reserves and VAT. It is validated against 161,344 real settlement lines from US, UK, German and Indian sellers, with every line classified.

Why conditional rows are omitted, never written as zero

Four rows in the entry above are conditional: marketplace-collected tax, FBA reimbursements, ads billed inside the settlement, and promotions. They appear only when those lines exist in the file. When they do not, the row is left out entirely rather than posted as 0.00.

A zero line claims the category was looked at and came to nothing. An omitted line says the file held nothing of that kind. A US seller in a facilitator state and a UK seller filing their own VAT produce entries with different rows, and both are correct. Any account whose net movement is under half a cent is dropped on the same rule.

The rule that keeps every account honest: a reversal folds into the account it reverses

A refund or reversal of X nets back into X's own account with its own sign. That rule, validated with a practicing bookkeeper, keeps each family of charges in one home account instead of scattering into a refunds pile nobody can interpret.

1. Refunded referral commission nets into Amazon Referral Fees as a contra, not into Amazon Refunds, so the account holds net referral fee expense.
2. ShippingChargeback nets inside Amazon Shipping Income, the revenue it claws back, so the FBA shipping charge and its clawback cancel to nothing in the account where both belong.
3. GiftwrapChargeback does the same inside Amazon Gift Wrap Income. Amazon reports shipping and gift wrap as separate revenue lines, and books that fold them into Sales will never agree with Seller Central.

The trap is in the file itself. Every row carries both a transaction-type (Order, Refund, Transfer) and an amount-type (ItemPrice, ItemFees, Promotion). A rule that reads Refund off the transaction sends a refunded Principal away from Sales, and the entry still balances, which is why the mistake survives: a balanced entry can still be split wrongly.

Reserves, disbursements and FX never touch profit and loss

Three of the fifteen categories move money without being income or expense, and each gets its own account so it can never reach a margin figure.

1. Amazon Reserved Balance holds what Amazon keeps back this statement and releases later. Booked to profit and loss it makes trading look worse in the month of the hold and better in the month of the release. More on reserve balances in QuickBooks.
2. Amazon Payable / Disbursement carries the transfer mechanics: payable to Amazon, successful charge, disbursement, and transfers that failed and bounced back.
3. Amazon FX / Rounding Adjustment takes currency conversion and rounding, so an exchange difference can never contaminate a SKU's margin.

On the clearing account: if your business has no account-level reserve, you can skip it and debit the bank directly. One bookkeeper noted Amazon now holds deferred transactions for high-turnover accounts instead of an account-level reserve, which changes how the deposit is timed and means some sellers find no reserve line at all. Since account names are editable, either setup works.

The second entry: COGS and inventory

Cost of goods is a second, separate entry, posted only if you supply a cost per unit. Amazon does not know what your goods cost, so nothing in the settlement can tell you.

Account	Type	Debit	Credit
Cost of Goods Sold	Expense	4,370.00
Inventory Asset	Asset		4,370.00

On reimbursements: Amazon pays you what it decided the unit was worth, which is rarely what it cost you, and SkuSum cannot tell the two apart because a settlement file carries no cost of its own. Which account is correct depends on how you value inventory, and the two answers are not competing opinions. Under periodic inventory, purchases less closing stock, the lost unit is already absorbed: it is not in closing stock, so its cost has fallen into COGS with no explicit write-off to net against, and a contra account would relieve the same cost twice. Other income is correct there. Under perpetual inventory, where the unit is written off as a discrete event at the point of loss, the reimbursement nets against a cost recognised in that same entry, and a contra account against cost of goods sold is correct. SkuSum defaults to Other income because it cannot know which method your books are on, and the account name is editable, so change it if you keep perpetual inventory. Every reimbursed SKU is flagged in the review bucket so you can compare the credit against your own cost. A2X defaults to an income account too. This page argued only for the contra account until 2026-09-09, when a practicing bookkeeper and the seller who made that case both landed on the method distinction above.

COGS is only as complete as the seller's cost file. A SKU with sales but no cost row would silently understate COGS and overstate profit, so every such SKU is flagged in the review bucket before export instead of being assumed to be zero.

On cost basis: v1 uses one landed cost per unit. A practicing bookkeeper's note is that unit cost drifts as you replenish, so a date-wise SKU cost log with FIFO gives a more reliable inventory valuation over time. Dated cost logs are on the roadmap; for now the single cost per unit is explicit and auditable.

Posting it in QuickBooks Online

1. Select New at the top of the left-hand menu, then under Other choose Journal entry.
2. Set Journal date to the settlement period end date, the latest posted date in the file, not the date the money reached your bank.
3. Put the settlement-id in Journal no. so the entry traces back to the file it came from. If your journal numbers are already sequential, keep them and put the settlement-id in the description on every line instead.
4. Enter one line per account in the order above, amount in Debits or Credits, memo in the description. Every account has to exist first.
5. Leave the tax field empty on lines that are themselves tax accounts. Amazon has already collected that tax, and calculating tax on a tax line doubles it.
6. Check the totals match at the foot of the entry, then select Save and close.
7. Reconcile the Amazon Clearing Account against the bank deposit. If it does not clear to zero, check the reserve line first.

Posting it in Xero

1. Go to Accounting, then Advanced, then Manual journals, then New journal.
2. Write the settlement-id into the Narration field with the marketplace and the period. Narration is what shows in the journal report, so that is where the reference lives in Xero.
3. Set the Date to the settlement period end date, the same date used above.
4. Set Amounts are to No Tax. The settlement lines already carry Amazon's tax treatment, and a tax rate applied again creates a second liability for the same money.
5. Enter one line per account with its description, debit and credit. Xero refuses an unbalanced journal, so a rejection means a mistyped line.
6. Select Post, or Save as draft if a colleague reviews journals first.
7. Reconcile the clearing account against the bank statement line for the payout.

Suggested QuickBooks account and detail types

These account and detail types were reviewed with a practicing ecommerce bookkeeper. They are a starting point, not a rule, and account names are editable so you can match any chart of accounts.

Shipping and gift wrap get their own income accounts because Amazon reports them as separate revenue lines, and each chargeback nets inside its own account rather than becoming a fee.

One bookkeeper flagged that promotions can sit as contra income rather than an expense, so both appear above under the same detail type. The tool books the debit either way; the account classification is your call in QBO.

What this entry refuses to guess

Unknown line types hard-block the export. Amazon invents new line types regularly, and a tool that pushes an unrecognised line into a catch-all produces books that balance and are wrong. The export stops, the exact rows appear in the review bucket, and you decide. Custom mappings are allowed only for types the mapping does not already know, and every custom-mapped line is disclosed in the review bucket and in the export trailer.

Two questions stay separate: the journal ties out to the deposit while individual SKU margins may still be flagged for review. Both states are shown explicitly, instead of letting a balanced journal imply that every SKU number is final.

The entry above is correct by hand, and it is what SkuSum builds automatically: it reads your settlement file in your browser, nothing uploaded and no Amazon login, writes the settlement-id into the journal reference, omits the rows your file does not have, and refuses to export while a line type is unrecognised. Run your own file and compare it against the split you would have made.

Questions I would value bookkeeper input on (in writing, no call)

1. Account names. Do these map cleanly, or should they match a standard ecommerce chart of accounts, or use account codes?
2. COGS. Is a separate "Dr COGS / Cr Inventory" entry per period what you expect, or do you book it differently (periodic vs perpetual)? Cost is seller provided; v1 uses one landed cost per unit, FIFO is on the roadmap.
3. Sales tax. We credit "Sales Tax Collected" as a liability. For marketplace facilitator states Amazon also withholds and remits it, so it nets to about zero. Is that the treatment you want?
4. Refunds. Refunded referral commission now nets against Referral Fees as a contra, per a bookkeeper's steer. For refunds of the sale itself, do you prefer a separate Returns account or netting against sales?
5. Clearing account. Does "Amazon Clearing Account, then bank" match how you reconcile Amazon deposits, or do you post straight to the bank account?

If you run Amazon clients and review the mapping against your real practice, in writing whenever suits you, you get free lifetime access and a say in what gets built first. A one line note on any of the five is enough.