FBA Reimbursement
An FBA reimbursement is money Amazon pays you back for inventory it lost or damaged in its warehouses, customer returns never actually returned, and fee overcharges from wrong weights or dimensions. Amazon reimburses some of it automatically and quietly misses the rest, and claim windows have shrunk to as little as 60 days for some claim types. For most FBA sellers, recoverable amounts run 1% to 3% of FBA revenue, real money left on the table by default.
Scale the percentage and the stakes get obvious: a seller doing $600,000 a year through FBA is typically owed $6,000 to $18,000 annually across lost inbound units, warehouse damage, un-returned returns and fee errors. None of it arrives without an audit trail. Finding it means reconciling inventory movements report by report, exactly the work a bank feed never surfaces, and with the shortened deadlines, money not claimed inside the window is simply gone.
Bookkeeping treatment matters too: reimbursements are recovery of inventory cost, which offsets COGS or shrinkage, not a happy little "other income" line. Booked wrong, they inflate revenue and distort margins on the affected SKUs. Reimbursement review rides along naturally with settlement-level reconciliation, one of the ways specialist Amazon bookkeeping pays for itself, and the recovered cash usually covers a meaningful share of the bookkeeping fee.
Where this shows up in our work
This isn’t textbook material for us; it’s the day-to-day of keeping seller books right. See how we handle it in practice:
Amazon Bookkeeping Services→