How to Read an Amazon Settlement Report: A Real One, Line by Line

✨ Written with AI assistance from our own settlement data, and reviewed by Avanta Global EOOD before publication. Learn more

Short answer: an Amazon settlement report is the list of every amount Amazon added to or took from your balance in one pay period. Add up every line and you get the deposit, to the cent. The skill is reading three columns together: transaction type, amount type and amount description.

Below is one of our own settlements from Amazon Australia, 16–21 September 2026. It has 119 lines and a deposit of A$531.62, taken apart line by line.

The three columns that matter

A settlement flat file has many columns, but three of them tell you what each line is:

• transaction-type: the event. Order, Refund, FBAFees, other-transaction.
• amount-type: the family of amount. ItemPrice, ItemFees, Promotion, FBA Inventory Reimbursement…
• amount-description: the specific amount. Principal, Commission, FBAPerUnitFulfillmentFee, Subscription Fee…

A line is identified by all three together. Several descriptions repeat under different types, and that is where most spreadsheet mistakes start (more on this below).

A real settlement, grouped

Here are all 119 lines of our 16–21 September settlement, grouped by those three columns:

Transaction	Amount type	Description	Lines	Amount (A$)
Order	ItemPrice	Principal	26	944.73
Order	ItemPrice	Shipping	18	62.67
Order	Promotion	Shipping	11	−23.20
Order	Promotion	Principal	5	−10.00
Order	ItemFees	FBAPerUnitFulfillmentFee	26	−292.94
Order	ItemFees	Commission	21	−121.55
Order	ItemFees	ShippingChargeback	6	−39.47
other-transaction	FBA Inventory Reimbursement	WAREHOUSE_DAMAGE	3	61.74
other-transaction	other-transaction	Subscription Fee	1	−49.95
FBAFees	FBA Removal Order: Disposal Fee	Base fee + tax	2	−0.41
		Total = deposit	119	531.62

Every line is there, and the total matches the payout exactly. If yours does not, a line is missing from what you are looking at. The report itself is complete.

Reading the order lines

ItemPrice → Principal (A$944.73) is what buyers paid for the product itself. On Amazon.com.au this price includes GST.

Promotion → Principal (−A$10.00) is the discount you funded: coupons and promotions. It is a separate negative line, not a lower Principal.

ItemFees → FBAPerUnitFulfillmentFee (−A$292.94) is the FBA pick, pack and ship fee. For our product it is A$10.85 per unit on every order in the period, with no exceptions.

ItemFees → Commission (−A$121.55) is the referral fee. For our Office Products listing it is exactly 13% of the item price. That rate was not always 13%: how our referral fee went from 5.6% to 13%.

Shipping nets to zero

The three shipping lines look like income and costs, but they cancel out:

• ItemPrice → Shipping +A$62.67: shipping the buyer paid
• ItemFees → ShippingChargeback −A$39.47: Amazon takes back shipping it collected on an FBA order
• Promotion → Shipping −A$23.20: free-shipping promotions

Together: A$0.00. On FBA the delivery cost is already inside the fulfilment fee, so shipping lines are a pass-through. If you count the +A$62.67 as revenue and skip the other two, you overstate income by 7%.

The lines that are not orders

FBA Inventory Reimbursement → WAREHOUSE_DAMAGE (+A$61.74): Amazon paying for units it damaged in its own warehouse. It is easy to miss because it has no order number. Across our whole history these reimbursements add up to A$736.22 over 36 lines, more than a full month of storage fees.

Subscription Fee (−A$49.95): the monthly Professional selling plan.

Disposal Fee (−A$0.37 + A$0.04 tax): a unit Amazon destroyed at our request. Fees charged to you carry their GST as a separate Tax on fee line.

Lines this settlement did not have

Other periods carry lines this one did not. From our own history:

• Storage. FBA Inventory Storage Fee appears once a month as a base fee plus a separate tax line. It is not spread across orders, so a one-week window can show a month's storage or none of it.
• Refunds. A refund reverses the Principal, and Amazon returns the referral fee, but not all of it. Across our 9 refunds Amazon returned A$32.14 of commission and kept A$6.28 as RefundCommission, about a fifth. The refund still costs you the FBA fee and that fifth.
• Advertising. On our account Sponsored Products spend never appears in the settlement; it is charged separately to a card. Any profit figure built only from the settlement leaves out ad cost, so add it back from the advertising console.

The mistake almost everyone makes once

Principal appears twice in every discounted order: under ItemPrice (positive, what was charged) and under Promotion (negative, the discount). Filter on the description alone and you mix them. Units double, revenue shrinks, and every per-unit fee rate comes out wrong.

We made exactly this mistake. It produced a referral rate that did not exist and a "defect" of orders whose quantities seemed to disagree. Both disappeared once we filtered on amount type and description together.

Rule: always identify a line by transaction type + amount type + amount description.

What to check every month

1. The total equals the deposit. If not, you are missing lines.
2. Fee per unit is flat. FBA fees and referral rate should be stable per SKU. A step change is a price, size-tier or schedule change worth explaining.
3. Reimbursements are there. Warehouse damage and lost-inventory credits come in quietly. Count them.
4. Refunds cost more than the refund. Look at RefundCommission and the FBA fee you do not get back.
5. Ad spend is added back if your ads are billed outside the settlement.

AgentXray reads these same lines through Amazon's API and does this grouping per SKU and per marketplace, so profit is computed from what Amazon actually paid. To try it on a single report first, the settlement profit reader runs in your browser.

FAQ

Where do I download my Amazon settlement report? In Seller Central, under Reports → Payments → All Statements. Download the flat file (V2) for the period you want.

Why doesn't my settlement match my sales report? Sales reports count orders when they are placed; the settlement counts money when it is posted. Refunds, reimbursements, storage and subscription lines also have no matching order in a sales report.

Is Amazon advertising included in the settlement report? It can be, depending on how your advertising is billed. On our account it is charged to a card and never appears in the settlement, so we add it back separately.

About this article

All figures come from Avanta Global EOOD's own Amazon.com.au settlements: the 16–21 September 2026 settlement (119 lines, A$531.62) and our full settlement history from February to September 2026 (21 settlements) for the refund and reimbursement totals. Measured on 30 September 2026. Currency is Australian dollars.