Amazon FBA Bookkeeping: How to Record Seller Central Payouts Correctly

Amazon FBA sellers receive bi-weekly payouts from Amazon Seller Central, and almost every new client we onboard has been recording them incorrectly. The payout is not your revenue — it is the net of gross sales, FBA fees, returns, storage costs, and any reserves Amazon is holding. Recording the payout as income can overstate your revenue by 30–40%.

What Amazon Actually Pays You

An Amazon FBA payout includes: gross sales in the period, minus Amazon referral fees (typically 6–15% of sale price), minus FBA fulfilment fees (per unit, based on size and weight), minus FBA storage fees (monthly, based on cubic feet), minus returns and refunds processed in the period, minus any reserve Amazon is holding (typically 7 days of rolling disbursements). What hits your bank is what is left after all of these.

The Correct Way to Record Amazon Payouts

The proper approach: 1) Record gross sales as revenue (using A2X or manually from the settlement report). 2) Record each fee type as a separate expense category — referral fees, FBA fees, storage fees. 3) Record returns as a reduction in revenue. 4) The net payout clears through a clearing account. This gives you accurate gross revenue, accurate fee expenses, and correct net profit — not just the payout amount.

Recording FBA Inventory and COGS

For product sellers, Cost of Goods Sold is a critical piece of the puzzle. Every unit you send to Amazon FBA represents inventory. When a unit is sold, the cost of that unit moves from inventory to COGS. This is the matching principle: you match the cost of the product to the revenue from its sale. Many e-commerce sellers skip this entirely, which overstates profit and creates problems at tax time when the inventory balance does not match reality.

Using A2X for Amazon Bookkeeping

A2X reads your Amazon settlement reports and automatically generates the correct journal entries in QuickBooks or Xero — breaking down the payout into all its components. For high-volume Amazon sellers, this is essentially mandatory. Doing it manually from settlement reports is error-prone and takes 4–6 hours per settlement period that you will never get back.

Frequently Asked Questions