Founders & Small BusinessFree
Amazon Settlement Reconciled to Bank Deposit
Every line on the settlement tied to the deposit that landed, with money held for timing separated from money held against risk.
River's marketplace settlement reconciliation reads the settlement report alongside the deposit that landed. What comes back is one sheet where every fee, refund, rebate and reserve line is a signed number, and where those lines add up to the gap. Alongside it comes a short document naming what did not reconcile, in dollars, and which lines to look at first. If the residual is not zero, you are told what it is rather than shown a tidier total.
The pages that rank for this search all reach the same conclusion, that the difference is reserves, and then stop. Reserves are two things rather than one, and the marketplace publishes both. The timing hold is money you have already earned that is scheduled to arrive later. The risk hold is money kept back against refunds and chargebacks. Netting them gives you the size of the gap without telling you whether it comes back next period or is gone, which is the part that decides anything.
Written for sellers on Amazon, Shopify or Etsy who looked at a deposit and could not say what it was, and for the bookkeepers closing their month. Reach for it when a period straddles your month end, which it usually does. The bank statement side is a separate job, and the reconciled figure is the actuals a startup cash flow forecast gets built on. When two of your own reports disagree about one quarter, that is a different reconciliation. The goods side of the same period is an order and fulfilment reconciliation.
The withheld money is two things, and the marketplace names both
Amazon's balances endpoint splits the withheld amount into exactly two values. DEFERRED is revenue temporarily withheld before being transferred to the available balance after a specified period, which is timing and nothing else. ACCOUNT_LEVEL_RESERVE is held as a safety measure against refunds, chargebacks and other claims, which is risk and nothing else. RESERVED is documented as their sum, and in Amazon's own example the two carry opposite signs: DEFERRED of 9,000 against a reserve of minus 2,000.
The split matters because the reserve enters the bridge as a movement rather than a balance. Amazon puts the previous statement's withheld reserve into this statement's beginning balance, so the two references cancel and what survives is the difference between closing and opening. Subtract the closing balance instead, which is what the strongest guide on this search instructs, and the bridge over-explains by the opening reserve. In the example above that is 11,480.22, or 27.26 percent of the gap it was meant to close.
None of it transfers between marketplaces, which is why one spreadsheet cannot serve all three. Shopify keeps the reserve inside the payout: reservedFundsGross and reservedFundsFee sit in the payout summary, which carries no order-level field at all. Hold and release are separate transaction types there, so the movement is already in the stream. Etsy has no reserve, but every payment carries three value states and all amounts are integer pennies, posting to the ledger when the purchase ships rather than when it sells.
How it works
Add the settlement
Paste or attach the report, say what landed in the bank, and add the period before if you have it.
River reads every line
Each row classified by its transaction type, amount type and description, with the date columns kept apart.
Get the bridge
A sheet of signed causes tying to the gap, plus a document naming everything that did not tie.
Work the residual
Ask about any line, supply the opening reserve it went without, or add the next period and rerun.
What you get
- One sheet where every fee, refund, rebate and reserve line is a signed number
- The signed causes summed against the gap, and the residual printed even when it is not zero
- Money held for timing kept apart from money held against risk, using the marketplace's own fields
- The reserve taken as a movement between two periods, never as this period's closing balance
- The locale and the unit each file was parsed in, named per file before any arithmetic runs
- Variances worth asking the marketplace about, each with the arithmetic that makes it worth asking
Common questions
My settlement total and my bank deposit are different numbers. Which one is wrong?
Neither, most of the time. The settlement total is what the marketplace owed you over a period it chose, and the deposit is what it sent after withholding a reserve and netting anything carried in. The gap is a short list of signed causes. If they sum to it exactly, nothing is wrong, and the only question left is which of them you want to change.
Why can I not pull the settlement for the month I am actually closing?
Because you do not pick the boundary. Amazon states that settlement reports cannot be requested or scheduled and are automatically scheduled by Amazon, so a period will straddle your month end sooner or later. The run reports which date column it reconciled on and what the total would have been on the other one, rather than quietly choosing for you.
Do I need the previous period's report as well?
For the reserve line, yes, because the bridge needs an opening figure and a closing one. On Amazon the opening figure is usually carried on the report itself. On Shopify and Etsy it is not, so without it the document names the opening reserve as a missing input. It never falls back to the closing balance, which puts the residual out by a whole period.
My European settlement comes out wildly wrong in a spreadsheet. Why?
A decimal comma. Amazon documents that amounts appear in local currency formats, printing 95,00 for the EU rather than 95.00. A sheet set to a US locale reads that cell as nine thousand five hundred, a clean hundredfold, and nothing errors because both readings are valid numbers. Every run states the locale and the unit it parsed for each file first.
Will it tell me which fees to dispute?
It names variances worth asking about and shows the arithmetic behind each one. A referral fee off the category rate, say, or a refund commission with no matching refund, or a fulfilment fee inconsistent with the unit's own dimensions. Whether any of them is actually wrong is between you and the marketplace. Nothing here predicts that a claim succeeds. Which SKU a fee landed on is a margin-by-SKU question.
Where does the reserve belong in my books?
On the balance sheet rather than in the profit and loss. It is your money held for a while, so it sits as a receivable from the marketplace until release. Net it into a margin line and alternating months look wrong for no reason. The sheet keeps it as its own signed row, which is also what an investor-ready financial model wants from you.
Does this only work for Amazon?
Amazon, Shopify Payments and Etsy Payments, and it models each rather than assuming they agree. The three keep the reserve in three different places, post revenue on three different events, and Etsy counts in integer pennies. Where a marketplace has no field for something the document says so, instead of leaving a blank that reads like a zero.
Amazon Settlement Reconciled to Bank Deposit
Fill in the form and your workspace opens with the work already underway.