The TikTok Shop settlement export is the source of truth for what you actually earned — and it's one of the least friendly financial documents in e-commerce. This is a concept-by-concept guide to what it contains, so that when you open the file you know what you're looking at instead of guessing.
TikTok has revised the columns and naming of this export more than once, and details differ by region and program. This guide explains the concepts you'll find; the exact column headers on your file may be worded differently. (Sumhound's analyzer is built to handle that variation — and when it sees a column it doesn't recognize, it tells you rather than guessing.)
The two levels: order and statement
A settlement export generally works at two levels. At the order level, each row ties amounts to a specific order or adjustment. At the statement level, everything is aggregated into the single settlement amount that becomes your payout. Reconciliation means proving that the order-level rows add up to the statement-level total.
Revenue
The gross value of the goods sold. Watch for two things: it's before any deductions, and it includes rows that aren't really revenue — most notably creator samples that appear as fully-discounted "orders."
Fees (the cluster that does the damage)
- Commission / referral fee — the platform's percentage cut, usually the biggest deduction.
- Transaction fee — payment processing, a smaller percentage.
- Affiliate commission — paid to creators out of your proceeds when they drove the sale.
- Seller-paid shipping — where you subsidize delivery, it's deducted here.
Some exports give you a single "total fees" figure; others break each component out. If you have the components, use them — never add a components column and a total-fees column, or you'll double-count and understate your profit. (This is a genuinely common spreadsheet mistake.)
Refunds
Negative amounts for returned or cancelled orders. The key subtlety, again, is timing: the refund hits the settlement for the period it was processed, which can lag the original sale by weeks.
Adjustments
A catch-all for corrections, compensation, promotions funded by the platform, and penalties. Because it's a catch-all, it's the column most worth scrutinizing — an unexpected adjustment is either money owed to you or a charge worth disputing.
The settlement amount
The bottom line: what TikTok will actually pay for this statement. If you rebuild it from revenue minus fees minus refunds plus/minus adjustments and land on this exact number, your books are reconciled. If you can't, the difference is your to-do list.
A practical reconciliation checklist
- Exclude 100%-discount sample rows from revenue.
- Decide whether you're using fee components or a fee total — never both.
- Flag refunds whose original sale was in a prior period.
- Note any adjustment you can't explain and investigate it.
- Confirm your rebuilt total equals the statement's settlement amount.
When the file has tens of thousands of rows, this is a job for software, not a Sunday afternoon. Upload the export to Sumhound and it produces the reconciled waterfall automatically — and unlike a spreadsheet template, it flags the columns it doesn't recognize instead of silently dropping them.