How to read your Amazon settlement report (and find the money in it)

Every two weeks (or faster, depending on your programme), Amazon transfers money to your bank account and publishes a settlement report explaining the amount. Most sellers check the bank credit and never open the report. That habit is worth real money — to Amazon.

What's actually in the report

The settlement report lists every event that moved money in the period: each order's product charges, each fee (referral, closing, shipping, storage), refunds, reimbursements, adjustments and "other" transactions. It's downloadable from Seller Central under Payments → Reports. It's long, it's cryptic, and it's the only document that tells you what you were actually paid.

The five places money leaks

1. Fee errors — a product charged the wrong category's referral fee, or the wrong weight slab's shipping fee. A few rupees per order, on every order, forever — until someone notices.
2. Refund maths — buyer gets refunded, but did Amazon return the referral fee it charged you on that order? Usually most of it — did you check?
3. Lost and damaged inventory — warehouses lose things. Amazon's policy reimburses you, but many cases require the seller to notice and file a claim within the window. Unfiled claims simply expire.
4. Return charges on courier-fault returns — you shouldn't pay for a delivery that failed because of the courier. The classification in the report decides who pays; wrong classifications can be disputed.
5. Short settlements — the rare but real case where the maths of orders minus fees simply doesn't equal the payout, usually hidden by timing differences across settlement cycles.

How to check it yourself

Pick one settlement period. Export the report. For ten orders, compute what you expected: price, minus the referral fee at your category's published rate, minus the closing fee for your price band, minus shipping for the actual weight. Compare with what was charged. If all ten match, your account is probably clean this period. If even one doesn't, you've found a thread worth pulling — because fee errors are rarely one-offs.

Doing this for every order, every period, across five marketplaces is exactly the kind of tedious work software and stubborn operators are for. That's our reconciliation & recovery service. But whether or not you ever hire anyone: open the settlement file. It's your money's only honest biography.