Link Amazon to Xero and stop retyping orders
Amazon pays you a lump sum every couple of weeks with fees, refunds, advertising and VAT all mashed together. Turning that into clean accounts by hand is nobody's idea of a good time.
Where it hurts
An Amazon settlement report is a wall of lines. Buried in it are your sales, Amazon's referral fees, FBA charges, refunds, reimbursements and the VAT on all of it. Your accounts just show one deposit landing, which tells you almost nothing about what actually happened.
Most sellers either pay their accountant to untangle it every month, or guess a rough split and hope the VAT return holds up. Neither is comfortable, and the second one can get expensive if HMRC ever looks closely.
The data is all there in perfect detail. It's just locked in a format built for Amazon's convenience, not yours.
What I'd build
I'd connect Amazon Seller to your accounts package, usually Xero or QuickBooks, with a tool like A2X that's built specifically for the way Amazon settlements work. Each payout gets broken into its real parts (sales, fees, refunds, VAT) and matched to the deposit that hits your bank. You reconcile against numbers that already agree, and your VAT return is based on the actual figures rather than an educated guess.
What changes
- Amazon settlements land in your accounts split out properly
- Fees, refunds and VAT are separated automatically
- Payouts match your bank deposits with nothing left dangling
- Your VAT return rests on real figures, not a rough estimate
Related fixes
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