If your Amazon FBA settlement reports are landing in Xero or QuickBooks as a single lump sum, your accounts are wrong. Amazon pays you a net figure — sales minus refunds minus FBA fees minus advertising minus storage charges — and unless something separates those components into their correct accounting categories, your profit and loss is meaningless.
The Core Problem: What Amazon Actually Sends You
An Amazon settlement report contains dozens of transaction types: principal sales, promotional rebates, FBA inbound transport charges, FBA fulfilment fees, long-term storage fees, removal order fees, returns, reimbursements for lost or damaged goods, sponsored product advertising charges, and more.
| Transaction Type | Correct Accounting Treatment |
|---|---|
| Product sales | Sales revenue |
| Returns | Reduce revenue |
| FBA fulfilment fees | Cost of sales / fulfilment costs |
| FBA storage fees | Storage expense |
| Sponsored product advertising | Marketing expense |
| Reimbursements for lost stock | Reimbursement income |
| Lightning Deal fees | Marketing expense |
| FBA removal fees | Operational expense |
A2X: The Accountant's Preferred Tool
A2X has been the industry standard for settlement reconciliation since around 2015. It connects to your Amazon Seller Central account, imports each settlement report, splits every transaction type into separate journal entries, and posts them to your accounting software in a format accountants want to see.
What A2X does particularly well: multi-marketplace handling. Amazon UK, DE, US, JP — all consolidated into your single accounting software, with correct currency conversion for each settlement. Pricing starts at around £19/month.
Link My Books: The Newcomer With a Cleaner UI
Link My Books launched around 2018 and handles Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Shopify in a single integration — where A2X requires separate connections per platform. The UI is genuinely cleaner. Better value for multi-platform sellers. Pricing from around £14/month.
| Feature | A2X | Link My Books |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon settlement reconciliation | Excellent | Very good |
| Multi-marketplace (UK/DE/US/JP) | Single subscription | Supported |
| Multi-platform (eBay, Etsy, Shopify) | Separate connections needed | Single tool |
| Accounting software | Xero, QuickBooks, Sage | Xero, QuickBooks |
| UI complexity | More technical | Cleaner and simpler |
| Starting price | ~£19/month | ~£14/month |
| Accountant familiarity | Very high | Growing |
What Your Accountant Will Tell You
Most specialist Amazon FBA accountants prefer A2X for pure FBA sellers — they've used it longer, the journal format is extremely consistent, and setup errors are immediately visible. Link My Books is genuinely better value for multi-platform sellers (Amazon + Shopify + eBay).
What Neither Tool Does
Both tools reconcile settlements — they split the money correctly. Neither is an inventory management system. Neither automatically calculates true COGS including freight and duty. Neither tells you which SKUs are profitable after all fees. For SKU-level profitability, you need either a dedicated inventory system (Linnworks, InventoryLab) or a specialist accountant.
Getting the tool right is step one. Setting it up correctly — with the right chart of accounts, VAT mapping, and cost allocation — is where most sellers go wrong. Our Amazon FBA accountants handle the full setup and ongoing reconciliation.
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All guides on this site are reviewed for technical accuracy by qualified accountants in our network before publication.