Released vs Deferred vs Account-Level Reserve: how to reconcile your 2026 Amazon payout

Released is the money that already hit your bank this period. Deferred is money Amazon recorded as a sale but is still holding — typically until about a week after the order is delivered (the 2026 delivery-date-based reserve, often called "DD+7"). Account-level reserve is a separate, broader hold Amazon places across your whole account. All three show up in one settlement file, which is why you can see big sales and a tiny deposit at the same time.

If you've ever looked at a settlement, seen $9,000 in orders, and watched $3,100 land in your account, you didn't get robbed and your math isn't wrong. You're looking at the gap between what you earned and what Amazon released. Let's untangle the three buckets and then read them straight off the file.

Why do I see sales but almost no cash in 2026?

Because in 2026 Amazon doesn't necessarily release everything in a settlement at once. Much of it sits under a delivery-date-based reserve — funds from an order aren't made available until a set number of days after the carrier marks it delivered (commonly described as DD+7), rather than when the order ships or when the charge clears. Amazon applies this differently across accounts, so the exact timing on your account can vary.

So at any given moment, the orders you sold in roughly the last week-plus are sitting in a holding bucket. A two-week settlement period therefore tends to close with a chunk of recent, just-delivered-or-not-yet-delivered sales still deferred. Your revenue is real. It just hasn't been released yet.

This is one of the most common "where's my money" panics of 2026, and it's usually not a glitch. It's the timing.

What's the difference between released, deferred, and account-level reserve?

These three get blended together in people's heads. They're not the same thing:

The key mental model: deferred is per-order and time-based — it rolls off on a schedule as orders deliver. Account-level reserve is account-wide and discretionary — Amazon sets it, and it can move up or down based on your metrics, not your shipments.

You can have a healthy account with little or no account-level reserve and still see large deferred balances every period — that's just the delivery-date reserve working as designed. And you can have a brand-new account where the deferral and an account-level reserve are both eating into your release at the same time. They stack.

How do I tell released from deferred on the settlement file?

The Flat File V2 carries this in its 2026 status column. You're looking for the transaction-status field, and for deferred rows, the release-date that tells you when the money is scheduled to move. In practice:

• Released rows carry a transaction-status of Released and belong to the period's deposit. Sum these and you get the number that hit your bank.
• Deferred rows carry a transaction-status of Deferred and a future release-date. These are sales you've made but Amazon is still holding.

The trap: if you sum the signed amount column across all rows — released and deferred together — you get the net you've earned on paper for the period, which is not the same as what your bank received. Your bank received only the Released subset. That mismatch is what sends sellers down a rabbit hole every other week.

There's a second, sneakier trap in 2026. Sales tax that Amazon collects and remits for you (the marketplace facilitator tax) is not your revenue and not a fee Amazon charged you — Amazon is just collecting it from the buyer and sending it to the state. It runs through the file on its own rows (the Tax rows coming in and the MarketplaceFacilitatorTax rows going back out), and the two roughly cancel. If your tool folds it into revenue or into fees, every number after that is wrong. (Our parser had this exact double-counting bug; it's fixed as of v1.2.0, and tax now shows on its own line, separate from revenue and fees.) If you're reconciling by hand, keep facilitator tax in its own column. For what each of these row types means, the glossary breaks them down one by one.

Where does account-level reserve show up?

This is the part that confuses people, because account-level reserve isn't an order-level "sale" line at all — it shows up as reserve and balance-adjustment rows rather than as per-order deferrals.

If your deposit is short and you've already accounted for all the deferred orders, the leftover gap is often an account-level reserve movement. Two things to check:

1. Reserve adjustment rows in the settlement — Amazon moving money into reserve (reduces this payout) or releasing it back (increases this payout).
2. Seller Central → Payments → Statement View, where the account-level reserve and deferred-transaction balances are shown as running totals, separate from the current statement.

If the reserve balance jumped, that's discretionary — usually tied to a performance dip, a spike in A-to-z claims, or simply being a younger account. It is not something you read off DD+7 timing, and it won't roll off on a fixed schedule the way deferred amounts do.

How do I actually reconcile it, step by step?

Here's the reconciliation that makes the "where's my money" question go away:

1. Start with the released total. Sum only the rows with a transaction-status of Released. This should equal the deposit in your bank for the period (allowing a day or two of bank-posting lag). If it matches, your bank reconciliation is done — full stop.
2. List the deferred total. Sum the Deferred rows. This is money you've earned that's coming, on a delivery-date schedule. It's not missing; it's queued. Track it so you know your real near-term cash position.
3. Keep facilitator tax separate as you go. Don't let collected-and-remitted sales tax inflate either revenue or fees inside those totals. It nets to roughly zero for you and belongs on its own line.
4. Explain any remaining gap with reserve movements. Once released and deferred are squared away, anything left over in your deposit is usually an account-level reserve adjustment — money moved into or out of your reserve this period.

Do this once and the picture clicks: released is today's cash, deferred is next week's cash on a timer, and reserve is the cushion Amazon is sitting on at its own discretion.

Do this automatically

SettlementToExcel's Summary tab does exactly this split for you — it shows Net Payout (all rows) and then breaks out Released (hit your bank) vs Deferred (held by Amazon), with facilitator tax kept on its own line so it never contaminates your revenue or fee totals. It's a file-in / file-out converter, not a bookkeeping system — there's no auto-sync, no journal export, no COGS or PPC, and it won't manage your account-level reserve for you. What it will do is tell you, in about a second, why your deposit didn't match your sales.

Grab a recent settlement from Seller Central → Reports → Payments → Date Range Reports → Flat File V2, and drop your settlement .txt into the converter. You'll see your released-vs-deferred split before you finish re-reading this sentence.