How do I build a true profit and loss statement for my Amazon business?

What a P&L shows

A P&L answers one question: over this period, did the business make money? It runs top to bottom. Revenue at the top, costs underneath, profit at the bottom.

For an Amazon seller the layout is:

1. Gross sales: what customers paid.
2. Refunds: money you gave back.
3. Net sales: gross sales minus refunds.
4. Cost of goods sold (COGS): what you paid for the units that sold.
5. Amazon fees: referral, fulfillment, storage and others.
6. Advertising.
7. Other costs: software, shipping in, bank fees, your own pay if you want it counted.
8. Net profit.

Where the numbers come from

Settlement reports. Amazon creates these automatically for your account. The Selling Partner API documentation (the technical manual for Amazon's seller data connection) says settlement reports cannot be requested or scheduled, because Amazon schedules them. The current version lists each transaction with an amount-type, an amount-description and an amount, plus the settlement dates and the deposit date. That is your best record of what really moved in and out.

Your supplier invoices. Amazon does not know your product cost. You supply it.

Your ads reports. Ad charges show up in the Amazon Ads console, the place where you run your ads.

Your bank and card statements. For software, freight, and anything else that never touches Amazon.

Amazon's fee schedule is public on its pricing page, which helps you sanity-check what you see. As of November 2026 a Professional plan is $39.99 a month and referral fees are a percent by category, for example 15% for Home and Kitchen.

Fee dates to know, as of November 2026. Amazon says most of its 2027 US fee changes start on 15 January 2027, and that from 1 February 2027 one monthly storage fee, with a rate set by how old the stock is, replaces the current monthly storage fee, storage utilization surcharge and aged inventory surcharge. Amazon also says FBA fulfillment fees will rise by an average of $0.19 per unit sold, about 0.8% of the average selling price, though some products will go down. Storage fees in the worked table below are made up. For your own numbers, Amazon's Selling Partner API lists a Storage Fees report with the estimated monthly storage fee for each product, which lets you split storage from fulfillment in your own P&L. Keep fee rows dated by month, so a February 2027 storage line is not compared with a January one that used different rules.

A worked monthly P&L

All figures are made up to show the layout. Shopify is a hosted tool for running your own online shop.

Line	Amazon	Shopify	Total
Gross sales	$40,000	$22,000	$62,000
Refunds	-$2,400	-$700	-$3,100
Net sales	$37,600	$21,300	$58,900
Cost of goods	-$11,000	-$6,600	-$17,600
Referral and fulfillment fees	-$13,840	$0	-$13,840
Storage fees	-$700	$0	-$700
Payment processing	$0	-$650	-$650
Advertising	-$4,800	-$2,900	-$7,700
Shipping and other direct costs	-$900	-$2,400	-$3,300
Channel profit	$6,360 (16.9%)	$8,750 (41.1%)	$15,110 (25.7%)
Shared costs (software, staff)			-$6,000
Business net profit			$9,110

Margins are shown against net sales. Look at what the combined view tells you. Amazon makes 16.9 percent and Shopify 41.1 percent. If you only looked at Amazon sales volume, you would think Amazon was your main engine. The P&L says your own store earns more per dollar.

How to build it, step by step

1. Pick the period. Calendar month. Do not use Amazon's payout dates alone, because a settlement can span two months.
2. Pull the settlement data. Download the settlement reports that cover the month from Seller Central, Amazon's seller dashboard, under its reports area. Sum the amounts by amount-description to get totals for principal (item price), referral fees, fulfillment fees, refunds and so on.
3. Handle the date overlap. Sort transactions by their posted date and keep only the month you want.
4. Add COGS. Multiply units sold per product by the cost from your invoices. Use the cost of the stock you actually sold.
5. Add ads and other costs.
6. Repeat the layout for each channel with the same rows. Same rows is the whole trick, because it lets you add columns.
7. Total the columns and subtract shared costs.
8. Check against the bank. Your deposits for the month should roughly equal the settlement totals, adjusted for timing.

Common mistakes

• Using sales instead of payouts. Sales are not cash. The deposit date and the sale date differ, so the two will not match in any single month.
• Forgetting COGS timing. You paid for stock months ago. Count cost when units sell, not when you buy.
• Leaving out ad charges. Check where they appear for your account, and add them from your ads reports if your settlement data does not include them.
• Different row names per channel. Then you cannot add the columns.
• Mixing currencies. The report shows amounts in local currency formats, so a European comma can read as a decimal point.

Software and accounting tools

sellerboard, a profit analytics tool for Amazon sellers, covers Amazon profit and also lists Shopify, Walmart and eBay (two other big online marketplaces) as other platforms. As of November 2026 its plans start at $19 a month billed monthly, or $15 a month billed yearly, for up to 3,000 orders a month. Check its site for current pricing and for whether your channels combine in one view.

For the books themselves, accounting software like QuickBooks, a popular bookkeeping tool, records what was paid and received, but it does not know your product-level margins on its own. If QuickBooks feels too heavy or too costly, see my QuickBooks alternatives guide. If you want help with the data entry itself, AI bookkeeping covers what can be automated and what still needs a person.

A simple profit forecast

Once you have three months of P&L columns, forecasting is plain. Take your average net margin per channel and apply it to expected net sales. If Amazon runs at 16.9 percent and you expect $40,000 net next month, plan for about $6,760. Then adjust for known changes, such as a supplier price rise or a heavier ad month. Keep it simple. A forecast built on real margins beats a clever one built on guesses.

How I'd approach this

I would build the monthly layout by hand once, for the last full month, using the table above. It will take an afternoon and you will find things you did not know, like a fee type you never noticed or a product with no cost entered.

After that, decide whether monthly manual work is worth it. If you only sell on Amazon, a profit analytics tool is probably cheaper than your time. If you sell on Amazon, Shopify and more, the work is joining the channels into one layout, and that is where a custom dashboard that pulls each channel automatically starts to make sense. That is something I build, and it replaces the monthly spreadsheet.