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What is a settlement?

A settlement is the line-by-line breakdown of one Amazon disbursement — every penny of sales, every fee, every tax, every refund that combined to produce the deposit landing in your bank account.

The 14-day cycle

Amazon doesn't pay you per order. Instead it batches your activity into settlement periods — typically 14 days for FBA accounts in good standing — and at the end of each period it transfers a single net amount to your bank. Around the same time it produces a settlement report covering that exact window.

The window has a clear start and end timestamp, and every transaction Amazon ran on your account during that window appears in the report. A settlement period that started on the 1st and ended on the 14th will include orders shipped on the 12th, refunds processed on the 13th, ad spend deducted on the 7th, and so on — provided each fell inside the window.

What's actually in the file

Mechanically the report is a tab-separated text file with a small header section and a much larger transaction section. The header carries the metadata — settlement ID, marketplace, currency, period start/end, deposit date, total amount. The transaction section is one row per event, where each row carries fields like:

• transaction-type — what kind of event it is (Order, Refund, FBA Storage Fees, Liquidations, Order_Retrocharge, etc.)
• amount-type & amount-description — the sub-classification (ItemPrice / Principal, ItemFees / FBAPerUnitFulfillmentFee, ItemWithheldTax / MarketplaceFacilitatorVAT-Principal, …)
• amount — signed: positive for inflows, negative for outflows.
• order-id, sku, quantity, marketplace — context that lets you trace the line back to a specific order.

A typical 14-day settlement for a mid-volume seller runs to tens of thousands of lines. The maths always reconciles: sum every amount in the file and you get the total disbursement to the penny.

What TrueBooks does with it

When a new settlement appears (either via SP-API or because you uploaded the Flat File V2 manually), TrueBooks does four things in order:

1. Parses the header to capture the settlement ID, marketplace, currency, period dates, deposit date and total. These become the row you see on the Settlements list.
2. Imports every line into a structured database, preserving order IDs, SKUs, amount types and descriptions so you can drill in line-by-line later.
3. Classifies each line into one of about a dozen accounting categories (sales, refunds, FBA fees, storage, advertising, marketplace VAT, inventory reimbursements, etc.). The classification guide covers exactly how that decision is made.
4. Aggregates by category and produces a Xero-ready invoice with one summary line per category — sales as OUTPUT2, FBA fees as INPUT2, marketplace VAT as ZERORATEDOUTPUT, etc. That's the invoice you post to your books.

Settlement IDs and references

Every settlement carries a unique Amazon-issued ID — for UK accounts these usually look like 26881161592, prefixed in TrueBooks with TBUK- for readability. When TrueBooks posts the settlement to Xero it uses a reference of the form:

(£1,275.20) TBUK-26881161592

That reference is the stable primary key — it never changes for a given settlement, even if you void the Xero invoice and post it again. The Xero invoice number is separate (AMZ-TB-10001, AMZ-TB-10002, …) and is reused on a re-post rather than incrementing — see Posting to Xero for the full story.

Where to find your settlements in TrueBooks

The Settlements Dashboard at /settlements lists every settlement TrueBooks has imported, newest first, with status, marketplace, deposit date and total. Click any row to drill into the line-by-line breakdown. The 30-day summary bar at the top shows your last-month income, deductions and net disbursement so you can sanity-check at a glance — the n days not yet settled by Amazon hint tells you how far the most recent imported settlement is from today, so you know whether to expect a new one soon.