In this section we’ll review the different reports you’ll need to generate for bookkeeping & managerial purposes. We’ll cover inventory, sales, and payment reports. We’ve provided a document outlining the steps to generate each of these reports for you entitled “Amazon Accounting Reports.”
Note that some reports can take up to 1 hour to generate. If you do not see your report right away, check again later.
These reports either summarize or breakdown the sales you made, fees you incurred, and the money Amazon ultimately paid you.
Let’s start with the Statement View report as it displays a summary of the current and previous orders, refunds, fees and other transactions along with the balance Amazon disbursed or will be disbursing to you.
All Statements reports are pre-populated payment reports divided by Settlement Period. They can be viewed as a summary and downloaded in tab delimited and XML formats. These reports produce each transaction with various components divided among different rows.
Date Range Reports show each transaction on a single line with various components divided among different columns. Unlike the statement reports, you can create a specific date range for transactions.
The Transaction View report shows each transaction with various components divided among different columns on screen. The tab delimited file available for download divides different elements for single transactions among rows. This report is limited to only 600 transactions. For larger reports use the All Statements reports or Date Range reports.
You’ll probably get more granular data for FBA inventory using these FBA reports than your own accounting software. Consider that your inventory data in your books usually won’t reflect what is inbound to Amazon, what is missing, what is reserved or being transferred from one warehouse to another, and even what is damaged. It is possible to account for these differences, but it’s a tedious process to update continually. For bookkeeping purposes, most sellers only update this type of information annually, for tax purposes.
Although, it’s difficult and usually unnecessary to keep this information constantly updated in your books, it is readily available in Seller Central, and should be accessed regularly so you remain aware of your inventory position.
It’s natural to go to the Inventory Tab for your inventory-related reports, and there are a lot of reports available within the Inventory Tab, underneath Inventory Reports. They include:
While these reports can each serve specific purposes to inventory management, we have found for accounting purposes, this section provides little benefit. Many reports provide only partial data for accounting needs.
We recommend using the Inventory Health and Manage FBA Inventory Reports.
To navigate to these reports click on the Reports tab, then Fulfillment. Within the Inventory section of the left hand tab, click on Show more… (directly underneath the Inventory Event Detail link).
The Inventory Health report provides a viewable and downloadable report of your inventory including:
The Manage FBA Inventory report is only available for download and includes:
Many sellers with less than 50 SKUs use the Manage FBA Inventory screen (within the Inventory Tab) instead of pulling the Manage FBA Inventory report.
Whereas the other reports we’ve covered look more like your bank statement, this reporting section aligns closely with Google Analytics in look, feel, and real-time sorting capabilities.
To navigate to your sales reports, go to the Reports tab and click on Business Reports.
This will default to your Sales Dashboard showing today’s sales (and yesterday’s, and the same day last week, and the same day last year) each by hour. You can apply many filters here:
You can filter by date by clicking on the arrow next to Today’s date. Your filter options include:
You can filter by Product Category by clicking on the drop down arrow in that section. Your filter options include:
You can filter by Fulfillment Channel by clicking on the drop down arrow in that section. Your filter options include:
The default viewing window from the dashboard will be a graphical display. Comparing sales between current and previous timeframes or spotting seasonal trends is quick and easy with the graphs. To view this data as a list, you can select Table View in the top right corner of the Compare Sales section. At any time, whether in graph or table view, you can click on Download in the top right corner of the Dashboard, and you’ll download a CSV table of the data currently displayed according to the filters that you have set or have been automatically set.
That’s just the beginning though. The real meat of the Business Reports section is below the Dashboard Link in the section entitled Business Reports. All of the reports in this section are available for display and for download.
Each row will show a different day (week or month, depending on your view selection) with your SKU data aggregated. In this format, your figures for all of your items are lumped together, including stats like buy box percentage, average selling price, and average offer count. This report can be very useful when looking at overall account performance for a given period. Within the By Date section there are subsections of
The only major difference between these subsections is the default display for which columns of information are included. Within each of these subsections, you can mouse over the “Columns” tab on the far right center of the screen and select additional data columns for display. In essence, you have the ability to view Seller performance data at the same time as Sales data and in within any of the subsections.
For the By Date reports and Detail Page Sales and Traffic report with the By ASIN section, the button labeled Pivot, above the results table, allows you to switch between date-based reports and SKU-based reports.
Let’s examine a few key terms: sessions and page views. Amazon defines a session as a customer visit to an Amazon.com page. That “visit” lasts for 24 hours in Amazon’s calculation, meaning that, even though a customer views a number of pages multiple times (within 24 hours), it will all be considered as one session. Whereas, Page views are the actual number of times a customer visited a page. In one session, a customer can have multiple page views. As a result, your reports may show a more page views than sessions.
(these reports provide analytical data such as Sessions, Page Views, Buy Box %, Units Ordered, Ordered Product Sales, etc.). Data for these reports is generally available for up to two years. Within the By ASIN section there are subsections of:
All of these subsections provide the same column data. The only major differences among these subsections are:
These reports can be viewed on screen and filtered by data in the top right corner or downloaded in CSV format from the top left hand corner. These are valuable reports as they provide granular data for assessing SKU-level figures for Sessions, Page views, Buybox percentage, Units ordered, and other figures.
Takes you to the Amazon Selling Coach section and provides metrics to help you stay in stock on each ASIN.
Sort by In Stock % (over time) and Estimated Lost Sales (Units) for input on improving your business by remaining in stock.
Click the “Edit” button to update your inventory or initiate an inbound shipment with FBA. Although this report does allow you to see your products average sales, sales rank, and current inventory (for FBA and/or merchant fulfilled product), the calculations used here are simple and don’t take into account trend lines, or seasonality.
You’re also limited to looking at 7 or 30 days. For these reasons we suggest utilizing our replenishment worksheet to give you potentially greater accuracy and to gain the flexibility to forecast for whatever date range you specify.