Manually booking your Amazon sales begins with logging into your Amazon Seller account and downloading those bi-weekly PDF revenues settlement statements. These are the statements notifying you of your detailed split out summarized revenues activities for the period of time and when to expect a bank transfer payment from Amazon.

These statements outline the following types of activities:

  • Product Charges
  • Promo Rebates
  • Amazon Sales Fees
  • Refunds
  • Shipping Charges
  • Selling Fees (FBA & Subscription)
  • Other (typically inventory-related)

The actual bookkeeping involves creating a very similar set of service/non-inventory items and related Income type and Cost of Goods Sold type of accounts in your bookkeeping platform (such as QuickBooks).

I use the service/non-inventory items to create invoices with to actually book the outlined sales activity as stated on those Amazon settlement statements. The invoices are each going to have about 12 line items to enter all of the sales-related activity as detailed (each line item) on the Amazon settlement statements. So basically it is just a one-for-one match (matching each Amazon statement line item with each line item on your invoice).

The invoice date should be the last day of the period of the settlement statement.

Later on I apply the actually bank settlement deposit to this invoice. I keep invoices and deposits as separate events in my bookkeeping because sometimes the settlement date and the deposit date will cross into different tax periods from each other.

The actual income accounts, where everything ends up on your profit & loss statement, should also be organized and somewhat detailed as per the activities on the Amazon statement, as per your actual preference as you want to see it on your reporting.

Example: You can book the sales to the following income and contra-income accounts:

Amazon Gross Sales, Promo Rebates, Sales Refunds and Shipping Income.

Additionally, I recommend you also create Cost of Goods Sold type of accounts to book the following: Amazon Sales Fees, Selling Fees, Shipping/Delivery, Inventory Adjustments.

 

Note: AccuraBooks is a bookkeeping firm only, so please consult with your C.P.A. for verification and clarification about the contents of this article.

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