Connecting Amazon to your accounting via the SP-API: how to actually reconcile your payouts

One line on your bank statement stands between you and numbers that add up. Amazon deposits a net amount and hides dozens of fees, VAT lines, returns and reserves behind it. Anyone who tries to reconcile that by hand loses the overview at scale.

Short answer. You connect Amazon to your accounting through the Selling Partner API (SP-API): it pulls orders, fees, payouts and inventory from the settlement reports. The disbursed amount is net after dozens of fees, so you split those fees per category into Exact or Moneybird before you reconcile the payout against your bank line.

Why you cannot just reconcile your Amazon payout

Amazon does not behave like a normal customer who pays per invoice. You receive one disbursement periodically: the balance of all revenue minus referral fees, fulfillment fees, storage, advertising costs, returns, reimbursements and reserves over that period. On your bank statement you see that single amount. In your ledger you want the breakdown.

The settlement report is the only source that gives you that breakdown. The amount-type and amount-description columns tell you, per line, which kind of fee or amount it is (Amazon developer docs). If you book all of it on a single line called "Amazon costs", your bank will reconcile, but you lose exactly the insights you need to manage your margin.

What the SP-API pulls and what you do with it

The SP-API is the official programmatic access to your Seller Central data. For accounting, three reports are relevant:

• Settlement reports. The financial core: revenue, all fees per type, returns, reimbursements and the net disbursed amount. Important detail: you cannot request these on demand, Amazon schedules them automatically. Your integration therefore has to listen and fetch what is ready, not poll to force a report.
• Orders and order items. Per order the revenue, shipping costs and discounts, so you can set your proceeds at order and product level against the fees.
• Inventory (FBA inventory). What sits where, what is worth restocking, what counts toward your valuation.

This is exactly what Exact Online integrations such as the one from Orbis Software aim at: order processing, item and inventory synchronization, fetching reports. Fine for the happy path. The only question is whether the happy path is your situation.

Build versus buy: where standard tools do not cover your situation

I am honest about this. For a seller with one marketplace, one country and standard fees, an off-the-shelf integration is often enough. Buy it and you are done.

But you are scaling. You sell on Amazon, on bol and through your own shop. You run PAN-EU or move inventory across several countries, with VAT rules per country. You claim reimbursements that come back as separate lines. You have promotional discounts, return flows and reserves that do not map one-to-one onto a standard schema. Moneybird does not develop integrations itself (Moneybird help center), and automatically reconciling the payout is far from present in every existing integration.

That is the moat. Tools like Sellerboard and Helium 10 calculate your margin neatly on the happy path. They do not cover your exceptions, and they do not connect to your own systems and channels. That is where I build. Not because a tool is bad, but because your process has steps that no standard schema knows.

First audit the process, only then build

Before I build an integration, we audit the process. Administrations that have grown over time are full of steps that once made sense and now only cost time. A manual export route that nobody trusts anymore. A fee that gets booked twice. A suspense account that never reaches zero.

The order I follow:

1. What really has to add up? Net payout matched to the bank, fees per category in the ledger, VAT correct per country, margin per product across channels.
2. Which step can be smarter or removed? Not every manual action needs to be automated, some simply no longer need to exist.
3. What do we build? The integration that parses the settlement report, maps fees to your ledger schema, reconciles the payout against your bank line, and brings the data together in one dashboard across FBA, bol and your shop.

On VAT, watch one concrete point: Amazon invoices you as a foreign entity. With a valid VAT number you get a 0% invoice on the commission (higherlevel discussion). Your integration has to know this, otherwise VAT amounts end up in your booking that do not belong there.

The result: one source, numbers that add up

The end goal is not a prettier report. It is control. Your payout matches to the cent. Your fees sit categorized in Exact or Moneybird so you see where your margin leaks away. Your inventory, revenue and costs from Amazon, bol and your own shop sit in one overview, in the same definitions. And the manual work that used to cost you every month is gone.

That is what a custom integration delivers where a standard tool stops at your exceptions.