Small negative settlement balances rolled over by Amazon

You have some small negative settlements that have not been charged to your card by Amazon so there is no bank transaction to reconcile them against in your accounting software.

Negative settlements occur when the total fees during a settlement period exceed your sales revenue, resulting in a negative balance.

When this happens, typically Amazon charges the negative amount to your card on file but when the amount is small enough (typically less than about £/$/€20) they tend to roll these negative balances forward instead of charging your card on file.

Since Amazon rolled the balance into the next settlement for that marketplace, there is no bank transaction to reconcile the entry generated by Link My Books against.

If you have small negative balance settlements that are sitting in Xero/QuickBooks and have no bank transactions to reconcile them against then you can check the following to see if Amazon has rolled the negative balance forward:

Step 1: Take note of the small negative balance amount

In this example, the amount is -$5.27 and the settlement date range is 15th June - 29th June, from Amazon.com.

Step 2: Check the settlement dated after the negative one contains this line:

On the following Amazon.com settlement which starts on 29th June, we can see the line item:

"Amazon Reserved Balances - Repayment of negative Amazon Balance"

The amount of $5.27 is also shown.

Step 3: Confirm that the settlement following the negative one does not include the line:

When Amazon charges your card on file the settlement after would always contain the line:

"Amazon Reserved Balances - Successful charge"

See the example above.

Please note that if Amazon does charge your card you would see both the "successful charge" and "Repayment of balance" lines. In this case, you need to check which card they charged and link that to your Xero/QuickBooks account to reconcile the payment.

If you have now identified that you have a small negative balance settlement that had been rolled forward into the next settlement then you need to add a line item in Xero to the small negative balance settlement's bill or to the journal entry for QuickBooks.

​Xero users:
In our example, the bill in Xero would look like this:

We need to add a line item to this bill to net the total off to 0.00 since we have no payment to reconcile it against.

In our example, we add:

Description: Small Balance Rolled over by Amazon

Qty: 1

Unit Price: -5.27

Account: Amazon Reserved Balances

You also need to edit the "Total" box at the top right of the image above to "0.00".

Once you then approve the bill it will automatically be marked as paid since it had no value and will no longer be showing as awaiting payment in Xero.
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​QuickBooks users:

We need to change the bank transfer line item on the journal.
​
We would change the account from your bank account to the Amazon Reserved Balances account and the description from "bank transfer" to "Small Balance Rolled over by Amazon".

That will resolve the issue.
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We are looking to automate this in the future but the issue is that until we receive the next settlement we don't know if the amount has been charged to your card or rolled over so it would mean not being able to process small negative balance settlements until the following settlements have landed also.

For now, we have found the above to be the best workaround.