How to read an Amazon settlement report and calculate true profit per SKU
Your Seller Central dashboard shows sales. It does not show profit. Between a sale and the money hitting your bank, Amazon subtracts more than 40 different fee types. This guide explains the Flat File V2 settlement report field by field, then shows how to turn it into real profit per SKU. When you're ready, drop the file into the free SettleClear tool — it does all of this in your browser.
Where to get the report
Seller Central → Reports → Payments → Date Range Reports. Request a report for a settlement period and download the Flat File V2 version. It is a tab- or comma-delimited text file with one row per financial event.
The columns that matter
transaction-type— Order, Refund, or an adjustment type.sku— the seller SKU the line belongs to.amount-type— the family of the amount:ItemPrice,ItemFees,Promotion,ItemWithheldTax, and others.amount-description— the specific line, e.g.Principal,Commission,FBAPerUnitFulfillmentFee.amount— signed value. Revenue is positive; fees and refunds are negative.quantity-purchased— units, used to allocate per-unit COGS.total-amount— appears once in the header row: the deposit that reached your bank.
Fee types, in plain English
- Principal — the item price the buyer paid. This is your gross revenue.
- Commission (referral fee) — Amazon's cut, typically 8–15% of price by category.
- FBAPerUnitFulfillmentFee — pick, pack and ship per unit for FBA.
- FBAStorageFee / FBALongTermStorageFee — monthly and aged-inventory storage.
- Tax / MarketplaceFacilitatorTax — sales tax collected then withheld; a pass-through that nets to roughly zero and should not count as profit.
- Promotion — coupons and deal discounts you funded.
- Cost of Advertising — Sponsored Products spend; often billed separately, which is why it's easy to forget in a spreadsheet.
- RefundCommission — the portion of the referral fee Amazon returns on a refund (a positive line).
The formula
For each SKU:
net proceeds = Principal + shipping − referral − FBA fees − storage − promotions − refunds + reimbursements
true net profit = net proceeds − (per-unit COGS × units)
Exclude marketplace-facilitated tax — it isn't yours to keep or lose.
Always reconcile
The sum of every line's amount should equal the total-amount deposit. If it doesn't, a fee was miscategorised or a line was missed — and any per-SKU profit built on top is wrong. SettleClear checks this automatically and flags the gap, plus any fee description it can't classify, instead of quietly averaging it away.