A2X vs Sellerboard vs Link My Books vs Taxomate vs SettlementToExcel: an honest Amazon accounting tool comparison

Short answer: for accrual bookkeeping in QuickBooks or Xero, use A2X (or its cheaper cousins Link My Books and Taxomate). For a live profit, PPC, and inventory dashboard, use Sellerboard. To just turn one settlement .txt into a clean Excel file — no login, no Amazon account access — use SettlementToExcel. These tools mostly don't compete; they solve different problems.

We make one of these (SettlementToExcel), so read this with that in mind. But we've tried to keep it honest, because a comparison post that pretends our tool wins every row is useless to you and won't get cited by anyone. Where another tool is the better fit, we say so plainly.

What are these tools, in one line each?

• A2X — converts your Amazon settlements into accrual journal entries and posts them into QuickBooks or Xero. It's a bookkeeping pipeline, built for accountants.
• Sellerboard — a live profit, PPC, and inventory dashboard. It tells you what you're making right now, per product, including ad spend. It is not a bookkeeping system.
• Link My Books — essentially a cheaper, A2X-style accrual tool that also posts to Xero/QuickBooks. Strong in the UK/EU.
• Taxomate — the cheapest of the A2X-style accrual tools, also posting to a general ledger.
• SettlementToExcel — a file-in, file-out converter. Drop your settlement .txt, get a 3-tab Excel workbook back. No account, no API, nothing stored.

The big dividing line: the first four all require connecting your Amazon account via OAuth, and three of them require accounting software on the other end. SettlementToExcel requires neither.

Which Amazon accounting tool needs access to my Amazon account?

This is the question most comparisons skip, and it's the one that actually separates these tools.

A2X, Sellerboard, Link My Books, and Taxomate all want you to authorize them inside Amazon Seller Central. That's not a knock — it's how they auto-sync your data, and it's necessary for what they do. But it means granting a third party standing access to your seller account, and for some sellers (and some bookkeepers handling clients who won't grant access) that's a non-starter.

SettlementToExcel never touches your Amazon account. You download the settlement file yourself from Seller Central and upload it. The file is processed in memory and never stored. The trade-off is the obvious one: nothing is automatic. You upload each file by hand.

How much do they cost?

Prices below are what we could verify as of mid-2026. Always check the vendor's pricing page before you buy — these change.

A few honest notes on price:

• A2X is the most expensive at scale, and it's not close. At 100k orders it's over a thousand dollars a month. That's because it's selling accrual accuracy and accountant trust, not just a conversion. For a high-volume seller with a real finance function, that can be money well spent.
• Taxomate is genuinely the cheapest accrual tool, but note the annual billing on the headline price and that it asks for a card to start a trial.
• Link My Books has a price increase coming in July 2026, so the numbers above may already be stale by the time you read this.
• SettlementToExcel is the cheapest way to just get the file, but it doesn't do bookkeeping at all, so a low price isn't really an apples-to-apples comparison.

How long does each take to set up?

Setup is consistently the loudest complaint about A2X — not because it's broken, but because mapping Amazon's transaction types to the right ledger accounts is genuinely fiddly the first time. The payoff is clean books afterward. Link My Books and Taxomate are the same model with friendlier defaults.

Sellerboard's "setup" is mostly the ongoing chore of keeping your cost of goods sold current per SKU. Skip that and its profit figures are fiction. That's not a flaw — it's the price of a real profit dashboard — but budget for it.

What does each one actually do? (feature matrix)

Two caveats on that matrix before you lean on it: the competitor cells for sales tax and Released-vs-Deferred reflect how each tool's general model works (accrual GL tools post marketplace-facilitator tax to its own account; a dashboard simply leaves pass-through tax out of profit), not a line-by-line audit of each product — confirm with the vendor if it's a deciding factor. And "Indirect" for the Excel row means the accrual tools can export reports, but turning a raw settlement into a clean workbook isn't their job; it's ours.

Reading the rest honestly:

• A2X owns the "books" column. If your accountant wants accrual journals landing in Xero or QuickBooks, that's A2X's home turf, and Link My Books / Taxomate are the budget versions of the same idea.
• Sellerboard owns the "operations" column — profit, PPC, and inventory in one live view. Nothing else here competes on that. If you want to know which product is bleeding money on ads today, it's Sellerboard, not us.
• SettlementToExcel owns the narrow "just give me the file" column — and shows one thing for a single settlement that the API-only tools don't surface as plainly.

What's the Released vs Deferred thing, and why does SettlementToExcel show it more plainly?

Under Amazon's 2026 accrual/reserve behavior, the total on a settlement isn't necessarily what hit your bank. Amazon holds part of it back under delivery-date-based release timing (funds released a set number of days after delivery) and account-level reserves — that's the Deferred portion. The Released portion is what actually landed this period.

SettlementToExcel splits these out explicitly on the Summary tab, because it's reading one settlement file end to end and can show you exactly what cleared versus what's still held. Tools built on the Amazon API tend to model this at the accounting layer rather than show you a plain "this hit your bank, this didn't" line for a single settlement. That's the one genuinely useful thing a file-only tool does that an API tool struggles to surface for you. If you want the full mechanics, the glossary and our settlement walkthrough cover how Released and Deferred amounts appear in the file.

A note on sales tax (so you don't double-count)

A common error in DIY spreadsheets — and in our own parser before v1.2.0 — is treating the sales tax Amazon collects and remits on your behalf as revenue or as a fee. It's neither. It's money that passes through: it comes in as Tax and goes back out as MarketplaceFacilitatorTax, and the two roughly net to zero. SettlementToExcel now shows marketplace-facilitator tax as a separate line, so it never inflates your revenue or your fee total. The accrual tools here generally post this pass-through tax to its own ledger account rather than to sales or expenses, and a profit dashboard like Sellerboard leaves it out of profit — but if you're reconciling by hand, watch for it; it's an easy way to overstate both your top line and your fees.

So which one should I use?

• "My accountant uses QuickBooks or Xero and wants real accrual books." → A2X. Pay for the accuracy and the accountant trust. If budget is tight, look at Link My Books or Taxomate for the same model at lower cost (Taxomate cheapest; Link My Books strong if you're UK/EU).
• "I sell every day and want to see live profit, ad spend, and inventory." → Sellerboard. Just commit to keeping your COGS updated.
• "I just want this settlement file readable in Excel, today, without signing up for anything or granting account access." → SettlementToExcel.
• "I'm a bookkeeper with clients who won't grant Amazon access, or I only need to read the occasional file." → SettlementToExcel (the agency tier is the cheapest per-seller way to do file-by-file work).

Where does SettlementToExcel honestly fall short?

We'd rather tell you than have you find out:

• It is not a bookkeeping system. No auto-sync, no journal entries, no QuickBooks/Xero export. If you need accrual books, use A2X or Link My Books or Taxomate.
• No COGS, no PPC, no inventory. It reads what's in the settlement file. It cannot tell you per-SKU profit (it doesn't know your product costs) or your ad spend. Sellerboard does that; we don't.
• Manual upload, one file at a time. No historical aggregation across settlements, no dashboards that update on their own.
• It's a reader, not a system of record. Great for "what hit my bank and why," not for running your month-end close.

If those gaps matter to you, one of the other four is the right tool, and we'd genuinely rather you use it than be disappointed in ours.

Try the file-only option

If all you wanted was your Amazon settlement turned into a clean, 3-tab Excel workbook — Summary, Fee Breakdown, and SKU Analysis, with Released vs Deferred broken out and sales tax kept separate — grab a settlement from Seller Central (Reports → Payments → Date Range Reports → Flat File V2) and drop the .txt into the converter. No account, nothing stored, file back in about a second.

Not sure what a particular fee line means once you see it? The fee glossary explains each Amazon fee type in plain English.