QuickBooks Online and Xero are both excellent general ledgers — and both are blind to how Amazon actually pays you. The integration layer between Amazon and your ledger is what determines whether your books reconcile in five seconds or fall apart at tax time. Here's the setup that professional ecommerce accountants use.
The architecture: settle, summarize, reconcile
One settlement = one journal entry. Each Amazon payout becomes a single summarized journal with totals per account, and its net lands in an 'Amazon Clearing' account that matches the bank deposit exactly. Sales tax that Amazon collects and remits as marketplace facilitator goes to a liability (or is excluded) — it is not your income. Multi-currency marketplaces (amazon.co.uk, .de, .ca) post in their own currency and let your ledger handle FX.
See what Amazon owes you — free
Connect your seller account and get a free reimbursement audit. No credit card, keep 100% of what you recover.
Common mistakes that wreck seller books
- •Recording deposits as sales (understates revenue AND expenses).
- •Syncing every order as an invoice (ledger bloat; reconciliation gets harder, not easier).
- •Booking marketplace-facilitator tax as income (overstates revenue, creates phantom liability).
- •Ignoring reserves (this period's held funds make deposits mismatch sales periods).
- •Letting unknown fee types fall into a catch-all account silently (margin analysis dies quietly).
Set it up in minutes
BeanHawk connects to Amazon (all marketplaces, multiple seller accounts), QuickBooks Online, and Xero. It seeds the chart-of-accounts mapping with professional defaults, lets you or your accountant adjust everything, blocks posting until the journal balances to the penny, and flags any new Amazon transaction type for review instead of guessing. Accountants can save a mapping template once and apply it to every client.