Amazon pays you on a settlement cycle, and the report behind each deposit is the "V2 settlement flat file" — a tab-delimited export you can download from Seller Central under Payments → All Statements → download flat file. It is complete and accurate, and almost nobody reads it, because at a glance it's a wall of codes. Here's how to reconcile it properly.
How the flat file is structured
The first data row is the settlement summary: it carries the total deposit amount, the currency, and the settlement period, but leaves the transaction columns blank. Every row after it is one component of one transaction, described by three fields working together:
- transaction-type — Order, Refund, ServiceFee, and so on.
- amount-type — the family the amount belongs to (ItemPrice, ItemFees, Promotion, etc.).
- amount-description — the specific line (Principal, Commission, FBAPerUnitFulfillmentFee, and many more).
Reconciliation is simply: add up every transaction row and confirm the sum equals the settlement summary's total-amount. If it does, the deposit is fully explained.
The categories that matter
Revenue (ItemPrice)
Principal is the product price; Shipping and GiftWrap are separate ItemPrice lines. These are your gross sales for the period.
Fees (ItemFees + ServiceFee)
Commission (the referral fee) and the FBA fulfillment fees live here, along with service fees like your monthly subscription and storage. This is where margin goes, and where overcharges hide.
Refunds
A refund reverses the principal and — importantly — returns a portion of the referral fee to you. If you only subtract the refunded revenue and forget the returned commission, your reconciliation won't balance.
Reserves
"Current Reserve Amount" and the previous reserve balance move money between periods. A settlement can be smaller than your net sales purely because Amazon reserved part of it; the next settlement releases it. Reserves are the usual reason a single period looks off until you account for them.
The reconciliation, step by step
- Read the summary row: note the total-amount and period.
- Sum ItemPrice rows → gross revenue.
- Sum ItemFees + ServiceFee rows → total fees (a negative number).
- Sum Refund rows → net refunds (including the commission given back).
- Add the reserve movements.
- Revenue + fees + refunds + reserves should equal the deposit. If not, a row type is unaccounted for.
What to watch for
The single most valuable thing reconciliation surfaces is a per-unit FBA fee that changed for a SKU whose size and weight didn't. That's the fingerprint of a size-tier reclassification — Amazon re-measured your item and put it in a more expensive bracket. Caught early, it's refundable; unnoticed, it silently taxes every unit. (We cover this in the 2026 FBA fee changes guide.)
Sumhound's Amazon analyzer does exactly this reconciliation on upload — sums every line to the cent against the deposit Amazon claims, and checks each SKU's per-unit fulfillment fee for drift within the period.