You know what you sold. You don't know what Amazon kept.
Referral fees, FBA, ads, refunds, and sales tax all come out before the wire reaches your bank. Books posted from the settlement show you every one of them, and what your margin actually is.
Books posted from sales, not wires
So you can finally see what every marketplace fee is costing you
Each payment gateway reconciled
So the money that left the order matches the money that hit the bank
Cost tracked per SKU
So you know which products earn and which ones you should stop selling
Sales-tax exposure watched
So you register in a state because you chose to, not because a notice came
The five errors we find in seller books
Multi-channel selling multiplies every one of these. What's a rounding error at one channel is a rebuild at four.
Marketplace payouts booked as revenue
An Amazon or Shopify deposit is gross sales minus referral fees, FBA fees, refunds, chargebacks, ads, and sales tax collected. Recording the net deposit as income understates revenue, hides every fee, and makes margin analysis impossible. The default QBO bank-feed import does exactly this — we un-bundle one payout in the field guide.
COGS and inventory not tracked to the sale
Without inventory valuation — FIFO or weighted average — tied to units sold, gross margin is a guess and the balance-sheet inventory number is fiction. You can't price, reorder, or kill a SKU on numbers you don't have.
Sales-tax nexus ignored until it's a problem
Economic nexus thresholds vary by state — often around $100k in sales or 200 transactions — and FBA inventory sitting in a state's warehouse can create physical nexus on its own. Unregistered exposure compounds quietly, with penalties and interest on top when it surfaces.
Payment-gateway settlements lumped together
PayPal, Shop Pay, Stripe, Klarna, and Affirm each settle on their own schedule with their own fees. Without a clearing account per gateway, deposits never reconcile to orders, and the difference becomes a mystery number that grows every month.
Refunds and reserves misread
Marketplace reserves and refund timing distort cash versus revenue when they're not separated from real sales. A reserve is your money held hostage, not a loss — but only if the books say so.
One payout, un-bundled
One Amazon payout. The default QBO bank-feed import records the top bar. The books should record the bottom one.
Books posted from sales data, not deposits
Every channel gets settlement-level parsing — Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, TikTok Shop, eBay — so the books post gross sales, marketplace fees, refunds, ads, and sales tax collected as separate lines, reconciled to each payout. We work with A2X or Link My Books where they fit, or set them up if you don't have them. The parser splits the data; we make sure the splits land in the right accounts.
Inventory and cost of goods run by SKU on a consistent valuation method — and if that method ever has to change, it needs IRS permission on Form 3115, so it's a conversation with your CPA rather than a quiet switch. Each payment gateway gets its own clearing account, reconciled monthly, so deposits tie to orders instead of approximately resembling them.
On sales tax, we track nexus by state — economic thresholds and FBA physical presence — accrue the liability, and coordinate registrations and filings before exposure compounds. Refunds and reserves are handled as what they are. The result is a multi-channel P&L where each channel's real margin is visible. See the full breakdown in the payout teardown.
Where software stops and a person starts
A parser can split a settlement into components, and it should — that's not judgment, it's data handling. It can't decide where you've crossed nexus and need to register, how to value inventory when landed costs shift, or whether a growing reserve is a timing quirk or a real problem.
Those calls need a person who's reconciled these payouts before. That's the part you're actually hiring.
Where it lands depends on three things: how many channels you sell on, your monthly order volume, and how many states need sales-tax filings. Tell us those and you'll have a real figure inside a day. Rebuilding a year of deposit-posted books is quoted separately.
Get your numberWhat sellers ask us
EC-1Do you book from my actual sales data or from the Amazon/Shopify deposit?
From the settlement data, always. The deposit is a net number that hides your fees and your real revenue. Posting from settlements is the difference between books you can run a business on and a bank-feed diary.
EC-2How do you handle marketplace fees, refunds, and reserves?
Each as its own line: fees as costs, refunds deducted from sales rather than buried in expenses, and reserves as money the marketplace is holding that is still owed to you. When a reserve grows abnormally we flag it, because that's sometimes the first sign of an account problem.
EC-3Can you track inventory and COGS by SKU?
Yes, on a consistent FIFO or weighted-average method tied to units sold. Your gross margin then reflects what was actually sold, and the balance-sheet inventory number matches something countable.
EC-4Do you monitor sales-tax nexus and coordinate registrations and filings?
Yes. We track your sales and FBA inventory footprint against each state's thresholds, accrue the liability, and coordinate registration and filing when you cross a line. The goal is to register because the numbers said so, not because a notice arrived.
EC-5How do you reconcile multiple payment gateways?
A clearing account per gateway, reconciled monthly. Orders flow in, settlements flow out, and the account returns to near zero — when it doesn't, something's wrong and we find it that month.
EC-6Can you work with A2X or Link My Books, or set that up?
Both. If you have one configured well, we work with it. If you don't, we'll set it up and map the accounts correctly — the tools are good, and most of the errors we see come from the mapping, not the tool.
EC-7Will my books give my CPA clean multi-channel numbers at year-end?
Yes — revenue by channel, fees broken out, inventory valued on a consistent method, sales-tax liabilities accrued. Your CPA gets a file to review, not a puzzle to reconstruct. That difference shows up in their bill too.
Show us the e-commerce file you're least confident about.
Thirty minutes, your books on screen. We'll tell you what's actually wrong with them and what it costs to fix. If they're fine, we'll say that instead.
Run something we haven't listed?
Most of what breaks in a set of books is universal — miscoded owner money, unreconciled deposits, a plug nobody cleared. Tell us what you run and what's going wrong, and we'll tell you straight whether we're the right fit.