Link My Books creates an invoice for each settlement you receive, however sometimes we create more than one invoice - why does that happen?
When a settlement spans more than one month we create one invoice per month that the settlement spans. This is to keep your monthly figures correct, which is especially important for VAT returns.
To keep the reconciling of these split settlements easy we roll the balance of the first part forward into the second part so that the first invoice will have a total of "0" and the second invoice will have the full total of the settlement - meaning you only need to reconcile the payment coming in from Amazon against the second part as the first part gets automatically marked as paid with it having a total of 0.
Settlements that span 2 months
On the 5th of September, we received a payout from Amazon.co.uk which spanned the payout period August 22nd - September 5th.
If we View that settlement via the Action menu:
We can see that in the first part there is a line showing like this:
This line is a total of all of the transactions that occurred in August, which is being moved to the LMB9: Amazon Reserved Balances account.
In the second part of the settlement we see the same amount being credited back:
What this does is allows us to account for the sales, refunds and fees in the correct calendar month to ensure your month-end figures are correct but at the same time keep the reconciliation of your bank statement nice and easy.
Now that the balance of the August transactions has been rolled into the second part of the settlement dated in September, we can reconcile the deposit into the bank in just one click and ensure our bookkeeping is accurate month to month too.
If you are reconciling foreign currency invoices in Xero please see this article, i.e EUR to GBP etc.
Settlements that span 3+ months
UPDATE 18th Feb 2025: We have now rolled out support to rollover balances on settlements that span more than 2 months. If you have any older settlements that were affected by this then the quick fix is to rollback and re-send them.
On very rare occasions you may also see settlements that span longer than 2 months.
If this happens the deposit from the sales channel won't match up with our summary entries as the split-month rollover balances don't automatically get applied when a settlement spans longer than 2 months.
This is pretty rare but can happen. It's often best to reach out to our support team if it does happen and give us access to your Xero or QuickBooks account and we can help you fix it.
If you're using Xero and would like to give fixing it a go yourself then follow these instructions:
Click the Match tab:
Tick Show Spent Items to ensure you see both invoices and bills:
Tick the invoices that make up the payout:
Once you find the correct invoices and bills the amount will go green and allow you to reconcile the deposit.
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