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Manually importing a Flat File V2

If you've already downloaded a settlement file from Seller Central, you can drop it straight into TrueBooks — same parser, same Xero output, no API connection required.

When you'd use this

• You have settlement files older than ~90 days that Amazon's API no longer exposes, and you've kept the downloads from when they were fresh.
• You don't want to (or can't) run an SP-API authorisation for a particular Amazon account — for example, you're an accountant working with files your client emailed you.
• You've used Seller Central's Date Range Reports tool to generate an ad-hoc report and you'd rather upload the file than wait for SP-API to pick it up.
• You want to test TrueBooks against a known-good file before connecting your live Amazon account.

Getting the file from Seller Central

1. Sign in to Seller Central.
2. Open Reports → Payments → All Settlements (or the equivalent payments page on your marketplace).
3. Find the row for the settlement you want and click Download Flat File V2.
4. Amazon hands you a tab-separated .txt file. Don't open it in Excel and re-save — Excel will mangle dates and numeric formatting. Keep it as the raw text file.

If the row doesn't have a Download Flat File V2 button — only Request Report — click that, wait 5–10 minutes for Amazon to generate the file, then come back and download.

Uploading into TrueBooks

1. In TrueBooks, navigate to Settlements → Import.
2. The Flat File Analyser opens. Drag your .txt file into the drop zone, or click to browse.
3. TrueBooks uploads the file, parses it on our servers, and shows a preview — settlement ID, period, marketplace, currency, deposit total, plus the count of transactions in each category. Nothing is persisted yet at this stage; the preview is purely for sanity-checking.
4. Click Import. The settlement appears on your Settlements list, exactly as if it had come in via SP-API. From there you can preview the Xero invoice and post it.

Multiple files at once

The importer accepts multiple files at the same time. Drop a folder's worth in, hit Import, and TrueBooks processes them in sequence. Each ends up as its own settlement row, identified by the Amazon settlement ID embedded in the file's header — so importing the same file twice is safe and just refreshes the existing row.

What if the parse fails?

The most common cause is the file being opened in Excel and re-saved as something else along the way (CSV with mangled commas, XLSX, a different encoding). The TrueBooks parser expects exactly the format Amazon hands you: tab-separated, UTF-8 (or Windows-1252), header rows followed by transaction rows.

If the parser surfaces a specific error — "couldn't find settlement-id column", "no transaction rows found" — that usually points at format corruption. Re-download the file from Seller Central if you can. If you can't, send the file (or a representative one) to support and we'll have a look.

Does manual import work the same as SP-API import?

Yes — same parser, same classifier, same Xero invoice output. The data path differs only at the very front: SP-API hands us the file content over an authenticated API call; manual upload hands us the same file content over an HTTP form upload. After that, the two paths converge.

The one practical difference: SP-API import is gated by the workspace having an active Amazon connection, and TrueBooks records which connection a settlement came from. Manual imports don't carry that link, so they show as "Manual upload" rather than tied to a specific seller account. If you later connect the same Amazon account, future settlements from that account will be tagged with the connection — older manually-imported ones stay marked as manual.