Once you have sent a settlement to Xero you will be able to reconcile the settlement against the disbursement Amazon, eBay, Shopify or Etsy will have paid out to your bank account.
If you need guidance on how to send your settlements to Xero from Link My books read this help article.
The good thing about settlement based accounting is that when you do so the amount shown on the invoice in Xero and the amount you receive into your bank from the sales channel will be exactly the same. This makes it really easy for you (or your accountant) to reconcile your bank account.
All you need to do is locate the deposit on your bank statement reconciliation in Xero and click on the OK button, as shown below:
This will work for settlements in your home currency, so if the invoice is in GBP and your bank account is in GBP too.
IMPORTANT - If the currency of the invoice is different to that of the bank account, then follow the instructions in this article on How to reconcile foreign currency settlements.
Why are some of my settlements being sent as bills instead of invoices to Xero?
When Link My Books sends your Amazon settlements to Xero we do so in the form of an invoice (almost always).
You may have noticed that we sometimes send your settlement (or part of it) as a bill instead of an invoice and wondered why we do that...
Since Xero does not allow negative total invoices, if you have a settlement which is for a negative amount then we have no choice but to send it as a bill instead.
Why would I have a negative invoice for a settlement?
There are two main reasons as to why you may have seen this happen in your Link My Books account.
You have a negative settlement. This can occur if your Amazon fees and advertising costs are larger than your sales amount. In this case Amazon will actually charge your card on file with the settlement amount and produce a negative total settlement report.
If you have a settlement that spans two months and you also have a large reserved balance by Amazon. In this case we split the settlement by month so we create two invoices but because the reserved balance will always fall in one or the other invoice it will end up meaning that one of your invoices will be for a negative total.
If you have any questions about this article or feedback on how we could make it better please reach out to the support team via the blue chat icon on the bottom right of the page or via email to [email protected].