Running a business is hard enough between marketing, hiring, product development, and shipping logistics. On top of all that, if you're selling on Amazon, financial accounting can feel like its own separate nightmare.
The good news: we can help with this part. We use A2X, a cloud-based accounting app built specifically for Amazon sellers. We don't often write full articles about a single vendor, this isn't sponsored content, we just think A2X solves a real, common problem well enough to deserve one.
For a deeper walkthrough, watch this in-depth video on understanding and setting up A2X.
Why Amazon accounting feels like a black box
One of the most important things a business needs to operate well is a clear picture of its numbers: sales, shipping costs, margins, and channel fees.
Amazon doesn't make that easy. All you get in your bank account is one deposit every two weeks, and that deposit rarely matches the revenue you think you made. If you use Amazon for fulfillment, you could have as many as 40 different types of income and expenses flowing through your account with them, and all of it gets bundled into that single number.
How much did you make in sales? Unclear. How much did you pay in FBA storage fees? No idea. How much did you collect for shipping? Also buried in there somewhere.
For more on the basics of Amazon accounting (in addition to A2X), read the Amazon accounting basics guide. If sales tax is part of what's confusing you, see what Amazon sellers still need to do about sales tax, even though Amazon collects it on your behalf.
Two ways to handle it yourself (and why neither works well)
You've really got two options: record the deposit as-is and call it done, or dig through Amazon's reports yourself to piece together what actually happened.
Option 1: Recording the deposit as sales
If you go this route, you'll be operating with an unclear picture of your business indefinitely. You won't know how your Amazon activity actually breaks down, and your timing will be off too. Amazon deposits hit every two weeks, which doesn't align with month-end. If you get a deposit on May 2nd and record it as "May sales," you're actually attributing April's sales to May.
That timing mismatch matters more than it might seem. If you're trying to record accurate cost of goods sold to see your real margins, you could end up with April's inventory expense hitting your books while the matching sales landed in May, this kind of timing mismatch is one of several common ways COGS gets miscalculated. That makes April look like a bad month and May look artificially strong, right when you might be making decisions, like new marketing spend, based on those numbers.
Option 2: Manually breaking out every transaction
The other option is digging through Amazon's back-end reports yourself to reconstruct what actually happened, sales, fees, shipping, storage, advertising, all of it.
This is possible, but it's genuinely time-consuming, and it doesn't get easier. As soon as you finish reconciling one settlement, the next one arrives and you're back at square one. Most sellers who try this eventually stop, not because they don't care about their numbers, but because the process doesn't scale with the rest of running a business.
How A2X actually solves this
Here's what would actually help: something that automatically breaks that one deposit into everything that really happened, sales, fees, shipping, advertising, timing adjustments, all of it, and reconciles perfectly to what actually hit your bank account.
That's exactly what A2X does. It handles this automatically, and connects the detail directly to your accounting software, so you're not manually re-doing this work every two weeks.
A real example: An $81,788 gap explained
Here's a real example (numbers real, names stripped) that shows exactly what A2X reveals.
One of our clients did $125,958 in sales over a two-week period. But only $44,170 hit their bank account in that same window.
The scare:
| Deposit from Amazon | Actual Sales (found by A2X) | Discrepancy |
|---|---|---|
| $44,170 | $125,958 | $81,788 |
Without A2X, this would look alarming and unexplainable, a deposit far below expected sales, with no clear reason why. They'd have no visibility into how much they were actually paying for shipping and storage, and no way to make informed decisions about whether those costs made sense.
Here's what A2X actually found:
| Category | Amount |
|---|---|
| Sales | $125,958 |
| Shipping | - $21,209 |
| Gift card credits | - $2,992 |
| Amazon fees | - $18,681 |
| Advertising | - $418 |
| FBA fees | - $13,128 |
| Amount lost with timing issues | - $25,360 |
| Net deposit in bank account | $44,170 |
With that breakdown, the client could see exactly where every dollar went, and A2X let them track upcoming deposits with the same clarity going forward. All of it synced directly into their accounting software, saving significant manual work.
How to set up A2X
We want to make setting this up as easy as possible. These two guides walk you through it:
Frequently asked questions
Why doesn't my Amazon deposit match my actual sales?
Amazon combines sales, fees, shipping, storage, advertising, refunds, and timing adjustments into a single net deposit every two weeks. Your true sales number is buried inside that one figure, not reflected by it.
What's wrong with just recording the Amazon deposit as "Amazon Sales"?
Two problems. First, you lose all visibility into what you're actually paying in fees, shipping, and storage. Second, Amazon deposits don't align with month-end, so you end up recording April's sales as May revenue, distorting both months.
Can I just dig through Amazon's reports myself instead of using a tool?
You can, but it's genuinely time-consuming to do consistently every two weeks, and most sellers who try eventually stop, right when Amazon's next deposit resets the clock on the same manual work.
What does A2X actually do?
It automatically breaks down every Amazon settlement into its underlying components, sales, fees, shipping, advertising, storage, and timing adjustments, then syncs that detail directly into your accounting software.
How big of a discrepancy can there be between a deposit and actual sales?
In one real client example, a two-week period with $125,958 in sales only produced a $44,170 bank deposit, an $81,788 difference once shipping, fees, advertising, and timing adjustments were accounted for.
Do I need separate guides to actually set up A2X?
Yes, we have step-by-step guides for both halves of the setup: connecting A2X to Amazon and connecting A2X to QuickBooks Online.
Stop guessing what Amazon actually paid you
If you're still recording Amazon's deposit as your sales number, you're missing real information about your margins, and probably making decisions based on numbers that don't reflect what's actually happening in your business.
Whether you set up A2X yourself using our guides or want our team to handle your entire Amazon accounting setup, we can help.
