How to read your Amazon Seller Central settlement report (without losing your mind)

To read an Amazon Flat File V2 settlement report, group the rows by the amount-type column: positive rows are money in, negative rows are money out, and the settlement total is the sum of every signed amount. Sales tax rows are neither — Amazon collects and remits those for you. (In 2026, the cash that actually hits your bank is the sum of the Released rows, not always the full total — more on that below.)

That's the whole report in a paragraph. The rest of this post is the line-by-line version, because the first time you open one of these files it does not look like a one-paragraph problem.

What is the Flat File V2 settlement report?

It's the raw transaction-level export behind every "Your settlement is ready" email. Every two weeks (or whenever a settlement closes), Seller Central lets you download a tab-delimited .txt file listing every order, refund, fee, reimbursement, and adjustment that rolled into a single settlement.

The catch: it has no totals. Around two dozen columns, sometimes thousands of rows, and the one number you actually want — what hit my bank account, and why — is not printed anywhere. You have to compute it yourself.

So most sellers download it once, can't read it, and never look again. Then tax season arrives and it becomes someone's expensive problem.

Where do you find the settlement report in Seller Central?

1. Go to Reports → Payments.
2. Open the Date Range Reports tab (not the summary "Statement View").
3. Click Generate a report, choose Transaction, pick your date range, and select Flat File V2 / tab-delimited.
4. Download the .txt when it finishes.

The reason you want the Date Range / Flat File V2 export and not the pretty on-screen summary is that the summary hides the per-row detail. The flat file is the only place you can see which SKU generated which fee, which is the entire point of reconciling.

What do the columns mean?

The columns sort into five jobs. You don't need all of them at once — you need to know which group you're looking at.

A few practical notes:

• The header/total rows are different. The first rows of the file carry settlement-id, total-amount, currency, and the deposit dates with blank order-id/sku fields. That total-amount is Amazon's stated settlement total — useful as a check, though in a deferred period it may not equal what lands in your bank (see the Released vs Deferred section).
• amount is signed. Money you receive is positive; money Amazon takes is negative. You do not subtract fees yourself — they're already negative, so the file sums to the net if you add everything.
• Which columns matter for what: amount-type + amount-description + amount for fees and P&L; sku + amount for product analysis; transaction-status for cash flow; the tax rows for nothing on your own books (more below).

What are the amount-types? The ~15 you'll actually see

amount-type is the column that organizes everything. amount-description then refines it. Here are the buckets that show up on a normal account, grouped by what they do to your payout.

Money in — your sales (ItemPrice)

• Principal — the product price the buyer paid. This is your actual revenue. (what Principal means in the glossary)
• Tax — sales tax the buyer paid on the item. See the tax section — in most US marketplaces this is not yours.
• ShippingPrice / GiftWrap — shipping and gift wrap charged to the buyer (these appear as their own amount-type values), each with a matching tax line where applicable.

Money out — selling fees (ItemFees)

• Commission — Amazon's referral fee, a percentage of each sale. Usually your single biggest fee line. (Commission glossary)
• FBAPerUnitFulfillmentFee — the pick/pack/ship fee Amazon charges per FBA unit. (FBA per-unit fee glossary)
• FixedClosingFee — a flat per-item fee in certain categories (media, etc.).
• RefundCommission — when you refund a buyer, Amazon keeps a slice of the original referral fee. A negative-on-a-negative situation that confuses everyone. (RefundCommission glossary)

Money out — account & FBA services (ServiceFee)

• Subscription — the $39.99 Professional selling plan fee. (Subscription glossary)
• FBAStorageFee — monthly storage for inventory sitting in Amazon's warehouses. (FBA storage glossary)
• FBALongTermStorageFee — the surcharge for inventory that's been sitting too long. (long-term storage glossary)
• RemovalComplete — what you pay to have Amazon ship inventory back to you or dispose of it. (RemovalComplete glossary)

Promotions (Promotion)

• Discounts you funded (coupons, deals) show up as negative Promotion rows. They're not an Amazon fee — they're a reduction to what the buyer paid you — so they reduce your net on the revenue side, not in the fee column.

Tax Amazon collected and remitted (MarketplaceFacilitatorTax)

• MarketplaceFacilitatorTax-Principal and -Shipping — the sales tax Amazon collected from the buyer and remits to the state on your behalf. (MarketplaceFacilitatorTax glossary) This is the one that trips up every P&L — see the next section.

Money in — reimbursements

• FBA-Inventory-Reimbursement — Amazon paying you back for inventory it lost or damaged. (FBA reimbursement glossary)
• CS-Reimbursement — a customer-service-driven reimbursement.

Everything else (other / adjustments)

• Adjustment, GoodwillAdjustment, and the occasional one-off. Small, but they still hit your net, so they still count.

If you're unsure what a specific label means, the fee glossary has a plain-English page for each of the common ones.

Why isn't sales tax part of my revenue?

Because you never get to keep it. In nearly every US marketplace, Amazon is the marketplace facilitator: it collects sales tax from the buyer and remits it directly to the state. The money passes through your settlement — it shows up as Tax coming in and as MarketplaceFacilitatorTax-Principal / -Shipping going back out, and in facilitator states the two net to roughly zero.

So three things follow:

1. It is not revenue. Counting the Tax rows as income inflates your sales.
2. It is not your expense. The MarketplaceFacilitatorTax rows are not a fee Amazon charged you — it's the same buyer money leaving again. Treating it as a fee makes Amazon look like it's costing you more than it is.
3. It nets out of your settlement anyway. Because tax in and facilitator-tax out roughly cancel, leaving it in or out of the total math doesn't change the final number — but it absolutely changes your P&L and your fee analysis if you misfile it.

This is exactly the kind of thing that gets double-counted. Our parser (v1.2.0) breaks these tax rows out onto their own line so they never land in your revenue or your fee totals — they're shown separately, because that's where they belong.

How does the settlement net relate to the bank deposit?

Add every signed amount in the file and you get the settlement net — the total of all activity in the period. For a simple, fully-paid settlement, that net is also what hits your bank:

Principal (sales)            + money in
Tax collected                + passes through
Commission, FBA fees, etc.   − money out
Subscription, storage        − money out
Promotions                   − money out (revenue side)
Facilitator tax remitted     − passes back out
Reimbursements               + money in
Adjustments                  ±
─────────────────────────────────────────
= settlement net (sum of all rows)

The reason it feels mysterious is only that the file makes you do the summing. Once you total the amount column, the result should equal the total-amount on the header row.

Here's the 2026 wrinkle, though: that all-rows net is not always the same as the cash that lands in your bank. When part of a settlement is Deferred (held back for later release), your bank deposit is the sum of the Released rows only — which can be smaller than the settlement net. That split is the next section.

What is Released vs Deferred (the 2026 accrual rule)?

As of 2026, Amazon doesn't necessarily pay out everything in a settlement at once. Part of it can be Deferred — held back and released later — under delivery-date-based rules (funds released a set number of days after delivery) and account-level reserves.

The transaction-status column tells you which is which:

• Released — this amount is included in the deposit that hits your bank this period.
• Deferred — Amazon is still holding this amount; the release-date tells you when it's scheduled to move.

Why this matters: your net for the period and your cash for the period are now two different numbers. You might "earn" $553 on paper but only see $384 land in the bank, with the remaining $169 deferred. If you budget off the net instead of the released figure, you'll think you have money you don't have yet.

This split is the part an API-only dashboard struggles to surface cleanly, and it's the first thing our converter shows on the Summary tab.

How do I reconcile the report against my bank?

Three numbers to line up:

1. total-amount on the header row — Amazon's stated settlement total (the sum of every row).
2. The sum of every Released amount — what should actually leave Amazon for your bank this period.
3. The actual deposit on your bank statement for that deposit-date.

In a fully-paid period with no deferral, all three match. When some rows are Deferred, expect #1 to be larger than #2 and #3 — that gap is the deferred amount, not an error. The reconciliation you care about is #2 against #3: the Released total should equal the bank deposit.

If your by-hand total doesn't match #1, you've probably mixed two settlement IDs in one file or fat-fingered the sum. If #2 and #3 don't match, check for a currency conversion (see gotchas) or a timing gap — bank posting can lag the deposit-date by a day or two.

If they still don't reconcile after that, open a case in Seller Central referencing the exact settlement-id and the dollar difference. A specific number and ID gets a faster answer than "my deposit looks wrong."

What are the common gotchas?

• The phantom Subscription fee. A $39.99 Subscription line can appear even during a stretch where you weren't actively selling (or were suspended). It's worth catching — it's right there in the fee rows.
• MarketplaceFacilitatorTax looks like a charge against you. It isn't. It's buyer money being remitted to the state. You didn't pay it; don't book it as an expense.
• Refund rows are negatives sitting in your "revenue" columns. A refund shows up as a negative Principal under ItemPrice. If you filter to ItemPrice and sum blindly, refunds quietly reduce the total — which is correct, but surprising if you expected revenue to only go up.
• Settlement total vs. bank deposit. In a deferred period the header total-amount can be bigger than the cash you receive. Don't treat the difference as a missing deposit — check transaction-status first.
• Multi-currency settlements. Sell in more than one marketplace and you may get separate settlements per currency, each with its own deposit. Don't try to reconcile a EUR settlement against a USD bank line.

The fast version

You can do all of this by hand — total the amount column, group by amount-type, split out the tax rows, separate Released from Deferred, and check it against your bank. It's an hour of pivot tables every two weeks, and it's the same hour every time.

Or you can skip it. Pull a recent Flat File V2 from Seller Central → Reports → Payments → Date Range Reports, drop the .txt into the SettlementToExcel converter, and get back a 3-tab workbook: a Summary with the Released/Deferred split, a Fee Breakdown grouped by amount-type, and per-SKU analysis. Sales tax is broken out separately so it never pollutes your revenue or your fees. No login, no Amazon API, and the file is processed in memory and never stored.

Still want to understand a specific line first? Start with the fee glossary, then drop your file in the converter and see all of it totaled in about a second.