Create a Billing Statement Amazon Template for Education Effortlessly

Billing statement amazon template for Education

how do you read an Amazon p l my name is Stephen Pope I'm the founder of my Amazon guy I'll walk you through how to read this thing here this is not my primary source of income I make most of my money running my agency I'm a better marketer than I am an operator which is why I'm comfortable sharing these details with you guys publicly so you can see here is a report in 2022 January 1st through October 25th an income of 739 thousand dollars this is actually down about 35 percent from last year the economy really wrecked a lot of my gift giving categories if you're curious what I sell you can go over to amazon.com age of sage we've really struggled trying to reinvent ourselves and come out with new products we've got soaps incense tumblers mom gifts you name that sort of thing okay so let's dive in so first of all how do you get to this in the top left of your hamburger menu here you can go over to payments under uh let's see I I said ahead of a second to go under reports payments when you click that that's going to bring up this screen here it starts you on a default statement view I'm going to walk through most of these drop downs give you some guys some ideas what to expect but the one most important report that I think everybody needs to do this is far more important than doing your QuickBooks I'm going to take some fire for that comment but essentially if you just click on date range reports and and you see what you can download there's a bunch of of different things you can generate in here so if you hit the generate button you can do a summary View and select by month you can do a custom and do it for the whole year so what I recommend you do at least once every six months maybe once a year depending on your size and how important this is your cash flow you're trying to figure out your profits and all that stuff run this report and download it this is more important to me than running QuickBooks I think a lot of sellers waste a lot of time trying to do transactional um QuickBooks and it's just it's see it seems like such a waste of time to do that when Amazon spits out this nice pretty p l for you already now I made a LinkedIn post about how I felt about this and somebody asked me the question how do I find Amazon's p l and it made me realize most of us have no idea the statement view exists so let's dive into this uh let's let's take a look at it so first of all if you go from top left to top right you got income on the left you got expenses on the right this is in a sense essentially all of the income inside of Amazon and all of the expenses inside of Amazon for most Amazon sellers this is ninety percent of the picture without looking anywhere else in five seconds you have a bird's eye view to what is going on with your account you know how many dollars are going in and most of you are Amazon native selling brands you don't have a website you don't sell in a retail store this is literally ninety percent of all the view now what's not tracked here obviously issue Warehouse costs your personnel costs and things like that but this is a pretty good indication so 739 000 in income and basically first 10 months uh before the big Q4 season starts up for me here in 2022. you can see the credits product sales non-fba product sales FBA right so you you can see here I made um just under a quarter million in fbm sales and just over a half a million in FBA cells product sale refunds how many how bad are refunds well just about fourteen thousand dollars add another five thousand in for fbm so twenty thousand dollars of these seven hundred forty thousand so if you export this into a spreadsheet you already know what my return rate is it's not bad uh FBA inventory credit I have no idea what that is not too concerned about it liquidation proceeds okay so I use Amazon's liquidation removal big fat whopping 148 dollars so I'm getting rich off liquidations shipping credits 15 000. honestly no idea what that is um refunds this is shipping credit refunds this might be like the claw back inside of the the transaction report um but it's probably in a different line item as well gift wrap credits honestly this feels like a pass through I don't actually think I'm making anything on gift wrapping so they're probably charging me in a different line item Promotional and rebates this is when you run like a coupon or a promo code sometimes I see Amazon throw their own free shipping offers to non-prime members and it shows up in the promotional rebate section as well and then finally rebate refunds so that's a dollar figure going back when somebody places a refund so you get the grand totals here had 27 000 minus on the income 767 000 in the credits now let's go over to the expense section on the right hand side I might have to move my camera a little bit so you can see the full picture so seller fulfilled selling fees these are going to be referral fees off my fbm basically 15 FBA selling fees this is essentially referral fees off FBA uh seller selling fee refunds so this is if somebody does a refund they give me that 15 back FBA transaction fees this is the biggest expense for almost everybody and that is the actual FBA shipping costs so if I sell this dumbbell in my hand right here I'm paying minimum four dollars to ship that out to somebody every single unit every single time what's interesting and then this might throw some people off but when you look at this my shipping costs out of FBA are almost twice as much as my referral fee and and if the referral fee is 15 that gives you some insight onto how expensive some of the FBA transactions can cost you uh that does not even account for FBA inventory inbound service fees this is when you're you're paying for the shipment to go into Amazon as well as shipping label purchases right so so there's there's a lot of logistics fees when it comes to Amazon big big big Hefty fees what I haven't seen yet is uh the advertising fee so I am curious where they're putting that um ironically not seeing a line item for this and I think it's now that it comes to mind this is one of the most frustrating things that's not included in the p l like obviously I'm spending money directly in the advertising fees for most sellers though if you're smart you're using advertising fees on a credit card and here's what blew my mind I didn't know this I learned this at a recent Amazon conference but you can actually enroll in the Amazon um American Express credit card card and get five percent cash back because American Express pays five percent on advertising and and so like you you get a really sizable discount on your ad cost it's basically like getting five percent off ads who wouldn't want five percent points uh on that so I enrolled in the American Express Amazon card uh I obviously am not an affiliate I'll get anything for saying that I'm I'm just telling you that's what I did for my brand it it five percent on my bottom line this year off ads uh so so that's not reflecting here so it's not a true picture of every single expense but it is everything except advertising uh to find the advertising report I might have to poke around a little bit to go grab that uh there is an advertising invoice history tab here let's go see what that looks like um unfortunately I do not believe there is a one size download for all of this but you can see I'm basically getting build 500 bucks every day right so if we just extrapolated that let's just say that's what I'm getting charged every single day for the year uh we ran this report until October 25th let's Google that what day of the year is October 25th that is uh day of the year give me 298 okay so 298 times 500. so 149 000 in estimated ads right so throw that into your p l uh and we're getting a little bit closer here so if I've got 740k income 279 000 in expenses add on to that another 150k in ads right so we're looking and then you can basically you know run that out to see what's the difference I did get a transfer of a half million dollars going directly into my bank account and then over here we've got uh taxes but this is pretty much a wash you can see it's basically 50k even in and out Amazon does take care of filing the taxes uh directly with all the states there's barely any states now where you have to deal with any of that that's one of the biggest accounting blessings of the century let me tell you who nobody wants to deal with State filing taxes God bless the government they do so much for me they're spending my dollars so well in Ukraine right now and all of those lovely tax things that they do but anyway so long story short this is an awesome report gives you a very nice snapshot of how things are going on there's there's a lot of great information in here inside of the payments dashboard there's also some charts in here you may want to check out so if you go over to the payments dashboard you can see this on a settlement side you can see this on a net proceeds you can see where product charges are going showing the sales the refunds the expenses and the account level reserves now one of the biggest pain points I hear frequently from Amazon sellers is Amazon's holding too much of my damn money uh and and it feels like they're holding it longer than two weeks it's like they're holding it for two weeks then they're generating a payment that takes another week to actually process so after all said and done there's just thousands of dollars that Amazon owes you that kind of sits there it's a pretty common complaint I hear there's really no great solution here it's just the cost of doing business now there are some businesses out there that will um for a fee pay you faster but I I don't like to give away any of my margins so I I just it's an account level Reserve just deal with it uh but but in here you get a pretty good idea of like the chart and how it looks like here's the product charges here's all my fees going out and again the one thing that this doesn't show ridiculously stupid that Amazon doesn't do this is the advertising costs um and so I really wish they they they would include that the transaction view this is going to show you specific order IDs the product that was sold the truck the total charges any promotional rebates Amazon fees and your total outcomes so on this particular one right here I got a wide mouth stemless wine glass sold it for 27 bucks my net was 1360. you can click on that 1360 and see all that information how they're calculating all of that good information move my video real quick and you can see here I'm paying the four dollars in referral fee the Pick Pack and all that stuff 9.33 that's actually pretty aggressive seems a little high but when you go in here and you look at some of this information you can see a lot of great uh drill Downs you can click on the orders you can click on uh well apparently I gotta click on a couple buttons to find this thing here we have two glasses on the same order which is why that fee seems so high but then when we actually go look at the transaction report or it's actually pretty normal about for 450 a glass to ship it out I really wish they'd give us some cost savings when they ship out two of my glasses together because you and I both know Amazon's making a better bigger profit on that but they don't pass any of those cost savings on to sellers unfortunately so if you want to get those cost savings you got a two packet yourself and of course who's gonna say you know which seller's gonna buy which two of your items if you're selling a wide catalog you know you get the idea of some of those problems but it is worth coming in here from time to time and just auditing this sometimes you can find that you know certain items are unprofitable there's really another cool thing I'll show you so if we look at like uh my smudge sticks let's go over to my inventory report real quick and we're gonna go to manage all inventory I'm going to type in smudge and if you click on and we're gonna go to my three pack right so I'm going to click on the three pack right here other cool call out I'll mention see these bills you can see which ones are red which ones are yellow which ones I'm low on stock on you have to ship in and create these shipping alerts check out this video next tax on shipping alerts if you haven't set this up you're crazy this is the easiest fastest way to keep track of your your inventory keep track of your crap quite frankly all right so let's click on the SKU here when we see this you can see the sales rank man my sales rank is kind of going down a little bit I'm not really sure what's going on here I might need to check out some of my some maybe maybe I need to run a sale or something like that on this as we scroll down though you can you can see a net proceeds tab again I'm gonna move my video over here so on the right hand side if you put your cogs in this is showing a lot of your advertising costs in addition so what's nice is this is down to the SKU level so they do show it here my sponsor product charges 740 bucks here's my net proceeds after cogs advertising shipping you name it Logistics all included 594 dollars last 30 days phone in on my per unit profit it's two dollars and fifty cents here is the item in question just so you guys can track with me a little bit so I'm making two dollars and fifty cents every time one of these sells right here I also have a subscribe and save people can do that I don't know why somebody would set up subscribe and save for a three pack instead of just buy the 12 pack because they're making a freaking time better deal on the value but you know what whatever people do what they want to do they just want three every three months I get it it happens all right so so those that's a really important uh drill down that we just did let's see if I go back to the right tab uh in the SKU economics section and to get here all you got to do is click on the SKU from the inventory Tab and scroll down so it's this is a really awesome report I think this is even better than looking at the high level p l that we've got right here going down to the skew level and seeing some of that information so if we go back to uh the other section so we looked at the statement View and there's all kinds of information you look at the statement we looked at this transaction view you can get super granular the all statements you can see standard orders versus invoisters nobody is looking at invest orders it's basically a b to B thing uh really not worth reviewing but you can see the beginning balances the sales the refunds the expenses all of this stuff one common question I do frequently get is on the business reports if we go over to the business reports go to sales and traffic does this report factor in returns answer yes it does so this report right here does already factor in returns uh so when you're looking at these product sales uh they're canceling out those Returns on the Business Report for a frequent question I get we've we've verified that several times you can go over just disbursement snacks this is how frequently uh the products sales the cost of goods are ending up in my bank account so you can see you know one week I got 13 Grand another we got 18 Grand this one just under 20 grand right there and they show when it's going to hit the bank and when it's acknowledged and all that good stuff mine's pretty much just every two weeks no problem there you can also look at the date range reports and this is how you generate that p l to begin with and that's when I showed you you could do it by a month you could do a summary do transactions so the summary report is the one that ends up popping out like this if you do a transaction report that's going to give you an Excel file where it shows like literally every single thing another way to look at that is to click on the transaction view right here this is literally the same data so you don't need to worry about that and then of course you can go audit your advertising cost but I'll be honest I prefer just look at that that directly in the campaign manager so if we wanted to see last uh let's see last 65 days I spent 37 Grand in ads 65k in sales and an a cost of 57 percent higher than I want truth be told but this is pretty normal uh in the gift category right now also you guys saw I am selling some items at ten dollars there is a pretty low margin on that so higher a cost is pretty standard and typical so that's that's the p l that's what I recommend looking at you can see all those campaign reports you can see a bunch of information I have brought on a lot of accounting guests in the past one of my favorite is Tyler Jeffco check out his videos here where we talk about profit versus growth he's the CEO of seller accountant if you have any accounting questions leave them in the comments section I will tap Tyler to come back and answer them with me I'll give you the marketer's answer you'll get an accountant's answer as well parse between the two dotted lines my job as a marketer is Top Line an accountant's job at the end of the day is generally bottom line uh CFO track if you will CMO track Prof Top Line CFO traffic profit there is a big big friction between these two one of the common questions I will typically ask clients when they hire my Amazon guys what is your what is your number a scale of one to ten one being profit at the cost of growth and 10 being growth of the cost of profit what is your number if you feel comfortable go ahead and add it to the comments section it's always fun to see people say hey what's my number so right right now my number is probably a four I'm trying to get some of those profits back out of my company because it's been such a hard margin year with the depression and the economic landscape but if you ask me that question a year ago I would have told you I was at eight I was going like let's launch a thousand skus let's do all these crazy things that entrepreneurs like to do right uh so your number can fluctuate from time to time and uh obviously consumers barely have enough money right now to put gas in their cars milk and bread from the grocery store every damn cost is up right now it is extremely difficult to get margin right now all right my name is Stephen Pope I'm the founder of my Amazon guy if you want to hire us uh for services to run your marketing over at Amazon you can check us out over at myamazonguy.com and book a free call with us we'll see if we give you a proposal and help you grow your sales you can also hire us to solve a problem same day coaching calls available as well you can file trademarks with us check out our flywheel with all of our services here we have a lot of public free information about SEO PPC design and catalog management those are your four fundamentals to run an Amazon account thanks for watching and please do leave a comment I read every single one myself and respond to as many as I can