Six Amazon exports carry almost everything a seller needs to know about money: the settlement and payments data, Business Reports, advertising reports, the FBA inventory and inventory age data, the returns and reimbursement detail, and the Fee Preview. Each answers a different question, none of them answers the profit question alone, and all of them go bad in the same four ways: SKUs that do not map to ASINs, dates on different bases, files scattered across laptops, and versions nobody can tell apart. Pull the six on a schedule, store them one way, and the profit question becomes answerable.
Settlement and payments data. Amazon's statement of what it sold for you, what it charged, what it refunded, what it reimbursed, and what it deposited. Seller Central's Payments dashboard is where Amazon points sellers to review FBA costs already paid (sell.amazon.com FBA fees guide, July 2026). This is the export that ties to the bank, and the only one that carries fees at the transaction level. Use it for: reconciliation, fee analysis by SKU, refund and reimbursement tracking, and the revenue figure your accountant will accept.
Business Reports. Sales and Traffic, and Detail Page Sales and Traffic, by ASIN or by parent and child (sell.amazon.com describes the report family). Sessions, units ordered, ordered product sales, unit session percentage. Use it for: conversion, traffic, and the demand side of any analysis. It carries no cost and no fee detail, so it cannot tell you what a unit earned.
Advertising reports. Campaign, ad group, and search term reports from the ad console, with spend, impressions, clicks, and attributed sales. Amazon Ads defines ACoS as spend divided by ad-attributed sales (advertising.amazon.com). Use it for: ad efficiency by product, and for the ad spend line in contribution. Note that ad spend attributed at the campaign level has to be allocated down to SKU before it is useful in a profit report.
FBA inventory and inventory age. The FBA Inventory tool in Seller Central tracks units on hand, excess, stranded units, sell-through, and, through its inventory age filter, how long units have sat in fulfillment centers (sell.amazon.com, "What is the FBA Inventory tool?"). Use it for: reorder decisions, storage and aged-surcharge exposure, and the physical count that your book inventory has to reconcile to.
Returns and reimbursements. Seller Central's fulfillment reporting lists customer returns with reasons and disposition, and Amazon's reimbursements for lost, damaged, or mis-handled units. Use it for: return rate by SKU, reason clustering, and the reimbursement claims you are owed but have not received.
Fee Preview. Amazon's forward estimate of selling and FBA fees per unit for products you sell through FBA, downloadable under Reports, Fulfillment, Payments (sell.amazon.com FBA fees guide, July 2026). Use it for: catching a fee band change before it hits the settlement, and for modeling a price change.
Cost of goods. Freight. Duty. The landed cost of the unit Amazon sold. Amazon has no idea what you paid, so no Amazon export can compute margin. Every profit analysis is a join between at least three of the exports above and a cost record that lives only in your books. That join is where the hygiene rules earn their keep.
Amazon limits how far back some reports reach, and the limits differ by report and change without much notice. This article quotes no windows because none could be verified on Amazon's public pages during this run. The operating rule that survives whatever the current limits are: download on a schedule (settlements as each one closes, the rest monthly), and never plan to retrieve a year-old report later. If it is not in your folder, assume it is gone.
Business Reports speak ASIN. Settlements and FBA reports speak SKU. Ad reports speak ASIN at the product level and campaign at the spend level. If you have ever relisted a product, created a second SKU for the same ASIN, or merged a listing, the three will not join cleanly, and the mismatch shows up as a product with revenue and no fees, or fees and no revenue.
Keep a single mapping table: SKU, ASIN, parent ASIN, product name, status, and the date the row was created. Every export joins through it. When a SKU is retired, mark it retired rather than deleting the row, so historical files still resolve.
Business Reports run on order date. Settlements run on Amazon's settlement period, which closes on Amazon's cycle and posts to the bank days later. Ad reports run on the date of the click or the date of the attributed sale, depending on the report. Returns run on the date the return was processed, which can be weeks after the order.
A month-over-month comparison that mixes bases produces a decline or a lift that is an artifact of the calendar. Label every file with its basis in the filename, and when you build a comparison, convert to one basis (order date is the usual choice) before you subtract anything. Is your Amazon data ready for AI analysis walks through the conversion.
A structure that works for a two-person team and a bookkeeper:
Raw files stay raw. Anything you clean, pivot, or join gets saved beside the raw file with a suffix, never over it.
The dangerous file is `profit-by-sku-final-v3-FINAL.xlsx`. It has a COGS column someone typed in from memory, an ad allocation someone changed the method on in March, and no record of which settlements it includes.
Two habits fix it. First, every derived file carries a header block: source files by name, date basis, COGS source and date, allocation method for ads and storage. Second, when the method changes, the old file is kept and the new one gets a new name with the date. A margin figure that cannot be traced to its inputs is a rumor.
Illustrative numbers. A garlic press, ASIN ending 7Q2, listed under two SKUs after a relist in May: GP-001 (retired) and GP-001R (active).
Business Reports for August show 620 units ordered on the ASIN. The settlement files show 590 units shipped on GP-001R and 12 on GP-001, from orders placed before the relist. Ad reports show $840 of spend on the ASIN's campaign. The FBA age report shows 1,100 units on hand, 200 of them past 181 days, all under GP-001R.
Without the SKU map, a join on SKU drops the 12 units and their $28.15 of fees; a join on ASIN double-counts nothing but cannot reach the settlement detail. With the map, 602 shipped units join to $9,012.94 of settlement sales, $1,351.94 of referral fees, $2,406.00 of fulfillment fees, $840 of ads, and, from your own books, $3,010.00 of FIFO landed COGS at $5.00 per unit. Contribution: $9,012.94 minus $1,351.94 minus $2,406.00 minus $840.00 minus $3,010.00 equals $1,405.00, or $2.33 per unit. The 18 ordered-but-not-shipped units sit in the order-date versus ship-date gap and land in September's settlements.
ConnectBooks pulls Amazon settlement data and posts it to QuickBooks or Xero at the transaction level, with each fee, refund, and reimbursement on its own account against the SKU that caused it, and FIFO landed COGS attached from your purchase orders. The SKU map, the date basis, and the version control are handled inside the reconciliation rather than in a folder. The six exports are still worth keeping as your own archive; the difference is that the profit join is done before you open one.
The join is also what an analytics AI needs before it can answer anything. Crunch, inside ConnectBooks, reads that reconciled data to answer questions about profit, fees, ads, returns, and inventory by product and period. Feed the same question to a general chatbot with the six raw exports pasted in and it will produce a margin figure with confidence and without a COGS. The exports are the raw material. The join is the work.
Running an e-commerce business comes with plenty of challenges, but ConnectBooks is here to make your life easier. With real-time insights, seamless integrations, and detailed tracking of your profitability and inventory, you can stay ahead of the game. Whether you’re selling on Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, TikTok or eBay, ConnectBooks helps you manage your finances with 100% accuracy and confidence, so you can focus on growing your business.
Ready to level up? Start making smarter, data-driven decisions every step of the way. Try ConnectBooks Free Today or Schedule a Demo
