Amazon Settlement Report Explained: A Seller’s Guide

Amazon’s settlement report (Seller Central → Payments → All Statements → Download Flat File V2) is the only document that shows every financial event tied to your account for a settlement period — not a summary, but every individual line.

The structure trips people up because it’s long, not wide: instead of one row per order with separate columns for commission and shipping, you get multiple rows per order, each with an amount-type, an amount-description, and a single amount column. A "Principal" row is your item price. An "ItemFees" row with description "Commission" is Amazon’s referral fee. Sum every row for an order-id and you get your net settlement for that order.

The most common reconciliation mistake is comparing this report against your Business Reports data by order date. Don’t — settlement reports are posted-date, meaning a transaction lands in whichever settlement period it was processed, not when the customer actually ordered. Refunds and reserve holds can widen that gap to weeks.

Group by settlement-id first to confirm the sum of your amount column matches the total-amount for that period — if it doesn’t, you’re working with a truncated download, not a real discrepancy. Then group by order-id to check individual orders.

For sellers running more than a couple hundred orders a month, manually pivoting a long-format CSV in Excel gets error-prone fast. Settlr reads Amazon’s settlement format natively and aggregates it back to order-level automatically, so you’re reviewing exceptions instead of building pivot tables every week.