Amazon Seller Central Reports Every Accountant Needs
Hand a CA a seller's login and they face dozens of Seller Central report types, most of which are operational noise for accounting purposes. In practice, complete Amazon books rest on a short list — two essential reports, two supporting ones, and a couple pulled only when specific questions arise. Here is the working set, what each answers, and the cadence that keeps a practice sane.
The essential pair
1. Merchant Tax Report (MTR) — Reports → Tax Document Library, monthly, in B2C and B2B variants. This is the statutory backbone: invoice-level rows with Seller GSTIN, Invoice Number and Date, Transaction Type (Shipment/Refund/Cancel), Order ID, SKU, Quantity, Ship To State, Tax Exclusive Gross, rate-wise IGST/CGST/SGST, and Invoice Amount. Everything GSTR-1 needs from Amazon sales lives here, and it drives sales vouchers and credit notes — the import mechanics are in importing the MTR into TallyPrime.
2. Settlement flat file — Payments → reports repository, per settlement cycle. Tab-separated rows carrying settlement-id, transaction-type, order-id, amount-type (ItemPrice/ItemFees), amount-description (Principal, Commission, FixedClosingFee, Shipping chargeback, TCS lines, and more), amount, and posted-date. This is where fees, GST TCS, income-tax TDS, refund cash flows, and the exact payout composition live. No settlement files, no reconciliation — it is that direct.
The supporting documents
3. Amazon fee tax invoices — the GST documents behind Amazon's charges. Settlement rows say what was deducted; these invoices are what an ITC claim stands on, and what should surface in GSTR-2B. Pull monthly, file alongside the settlement archives.
4. Bank statements — not from Amazon, but the third leg of the reconciliation triangle: every settlement-id's signed total should equal one bank credit.
The quick-reference matrix
| Report | Answers | Cadence | Feeds in Tally |
|---|---|---|---|
| MTR B2C / B2B | What was invoiced, with what GST | Monthly | Sales vouchers, credit notes |
| Settlement flat file | What was collected, deducted, paid | Every cycle | Fees, TCS/TDS receivables, receipts |
| Fee tax invoices | What ITC is claimable | Monthly | Input credit support |
| Bank statement | What actually arrived | Monthly | Receipt verification |
| Order/payment date-range views | Ad-hoc order questions | As needed | Investigation only |
| FBA inventory reports | Where stock sits, and how it aged | Quarterly / as needed | Stock and registration checks |
Reports accountants ask for but should not book from
- Dashboard sales summaries — directionally useful, but they lack invoice identity and GST columns; never a books source.
- Order reports — operational views of order status, missing tax detail; use for investigating a specific order, not for turnover.
- Payment dashboard totals — aggregates without amount-descriptions; the flat file supersedes them for every accounting purpose.
The distinction that matters: a books source must be invoice-accurate (the MTR) or paisa-accurate on cash (the settlement file). Everything else is context. The full comparison of the two primary reports is in MTR vs settlement report, and the exact download paths for both are in downloading Amazon reports.
A cadence for practices handling multiple sellers
- First week of the month: MTRs (both variants) and all settlement files overlapping the prior month, archived under a consistent naming scheme, per client.
- Import and reconcile while the month is fresh; exceptions get resolved when the client still remembers the order.
- Quarterly: FBA inventory review against state registrations, fee-invoice ITC tie-out, aged in-transit list cleanup.
For a practice, the multiplier is standardisation: the same four documents, the same pipeline, every client. That is the workflow TallySutra's Amazon to Tally conversion is built around — upload the standard files, review a short exception list, approve, and export balanced vouchers to TallyPrime, with the CA review step formalised rather than improvised.
Turning the list into a client onboarding pack
For practices, the highest-leverage move is converting this article into a standing request list every new marketplace client receives on day one: monthly MTR B2C and B2B, every settlement flat file, fee invoices, and bank statements, named per the convention and delivered to a shared folder by the fifth of each month. Clients comply far better with a specific, repeated list than with a vague request for the Amazon data, and the first onboarding conversation becomes a walkthrough of where each file lives in Seller Central rather than a negotiation. Add two standing questions to the pack — has FBA been enrolled in any new state this quarter, and were any months' reports revised — and the two most common sources of late surprises announce themselves on schedule instead of during filing week. The pack costs an hour to write once, and it converts every subsequent client onto the same rails the practice already runs.
Frequently asked questions
Which single report should I insist a new client provides first?
The MTR, both B2C and B2B variants, for every month being booked — statutory sales records cannot be built from anything else Amazon provides. Settlement flat files come immediately second, since without them fees, TCS, TDS, and payouts are unexplained. A client who can produce these two consistently is ninety percent of the way to clean marketplace books.
How long should Amazon report archives be retained?
Match your GST and income-tax record-keeping horizons, which run to several years after the relevant financial year — and assessments can arrive late in that window. Old marketplace reports can be harder to regenerate than to store, so the practical policy is: archive originals, named consistently, and keep them for as long as your CA advises for statutory records generally.
Can I rebuild books for past months if the client never downloaded anything?
Usually yes, within Amazon's report availability windows: monthly MTRs and closed settlement files remain downloadable for past periods, so a catch-up exercise is mostly disciplined downloading followed by period-by-period imports. Start from the oldest open period, import chronologically, and reconcile each month before moving on — a duplicate-safe pipeline makes the inevitable re-downloads harmless.
TallySutra turns Amazon, Flipkart and Meesho reports into reconciled, reviewed TallyPrime vouchers — duplicate-safe, with every rupee traceable to its source row.
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