TrueBooks·Support Open TrueBooks →

Support  ›  Imports & history  ›  Backfill

Backfilling history & the 90-day window

When you connect a fresh Amazon account to TrueBooks, by default we only pick up new settlements from that point forward. Backfill lets you reach back into your account's recent history with one click — and there's a separate path for anything older.

How Amazon's retention works (the constraint we work within)

Amazon generates a settlement report at the end of each ~14-day disbursement cycle and keeps it on file for roughly 90 days. After that, the report is no longer available through the Selling Partner API — Amazon archives it on their side and removes it from the API surface.

Equally important: SP-API does not let third-party apps request a settlement report for an arbitrary date range. We can only retrieve reports Amazon has already produced. So the upper bound on automatic backfill is whatever Amazon currently has on file — typically the last six or seven settlements, give or take.

i

Older settlements aren't lost — they just aren't reachable through the API. The older-settlements workflow below covers how to bring them in via Seller Central.

Running a backfill

  1. Open Settings → Settlement Settings → Automation.
  2. In the Backfill recent settlements card, pick a start and end date. The defaults are the last 30 days — adjust as needed; we'd suggest staying inside the last 90 days for the cleanest results.
  3. Or flip the All Available switch on — TrueBooks then ignores the date inputs entirely and asks Amazon for everything they currently have on file.
  4. Click Start backfill. The card switches to a "Backfill is queued" state and starts checking in for completion in the background.
  5. When the job finishes you'll see a summary: how many settlements were imported, and the date of the earliest one that came back. (If Amazon had nothing on file for the chosen range, that's noted explicitly so you know it ran successfully — there just wasn't anything to retrieve.)

While the backfill is running, settlements appear on your Settlements list as TrueBooks imports each one. There's no need to refresh the page repeatedly — the list updates as new rows arrive, and you can start posting them while the rest are still loading.

Need anything older than ~90 days?

For dates outside Amazon's API window, the workflow is "ask Seller Central to regenerate, then let TrueBooks fetch the regenerated report":

  1. Open the All Settlements page in Seller Central — for UK accounts the URL is sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/payments/past-settlements.
  2. Scroll the list. For each settlement you want pulled into TrueBooks, look for a Download Flat File V2 button. If it's already there, the report is current; if it's not, you'll see a Request Report button instead.
  3. Click Request Report. Amazon flips that row to In Progress. Repeat for any other settlements you want.
  4. Wait 5–10 minutes. This part matters — Amazon needs that time to actually produce the file. If you trigger Backfill in TrueBooks before Amazon has finished, SP-API won't have anything new to retrieve yet, and the backfill won't bring those settlements in.
  5. Come back to TrueBooks and run a backfill — either the same date range, or with All Available on. The newly-regenerated reports are now visible to SP-API and TrueBooks pulls them straight in.
i

If you want to skip the SP-API path entirely — or you've downloaded a Flat File V2 to your computer for archive purposes — you can also drop the file directly into TrueBooks's importer. See Manually importing a Flat File V2.

What happens if the same settlement is imported twice?

It's safe to re-run a backfill that overlaps with settlements you already have. TrueBooks identifies a settlement by its Amazon settlement ID, so a second import of the same settlement is treated as an update rather than a duplicate. Existing line items are replaced with the freshly-fetched copy, but the settlement row itself — including any Xero posting status — stays put.

Multiple Amazon accounts

If you've connected more than one Amazon account to your workspace (e.g. one for Europe, one for North America), the Backfill card shows a connection picker so you can pick which one to backfill. Backfilling each account separately is recommended — that way the SyncJob log clearly shows which account each batch came from, and a failure on one account doesn't blow up another.

How long does a backfill take?

Roughly five seconds per settlement, plus a small overhead per connection. A typical 90-day backfill (six or seven settlements) finishes inside a minute. "All Available" with a freshly-regenerated batch waiting from Seller Central can be a couple of minutes if there are many in the queue.

If a backfill stays "queued" indefinitely with no progress, that's almost always our background worker not picking up — get in touch and we'll have a look.