Payment reconciliation: why the marketplace deposit never matches your sales

It is the most frustrating ritual of the month. You open the marketplace sales report and it says four hundred eighty-six thousand pesos. You open the bank statement and find a deposit of two hundred ninety-seven thousand. You subtract, you get a gap of a hundred eighty-nine thousand, and you have no idea what it is.

The first thing to accept is that this is normal. The deposit is never going to equal the sales report, not because anyone is doing anything wrong, but because they are two different things: one measures what you sold in a period and the other measures what settled in a different period, after everything that gets deducted has been deducted. Expecting them to match is the original mistake.

The second thing to accept is that the gap can be explained peso by peso. It is not a mystery and it is not a cost of doing business. Every peso of those hundred eighty-nine thousand has a name, and once you learn the names reconciliation stops being a lost afternoon and becomes a twenty-minute process.

This post is about those names, about why Amazon’s calendar does not respect your month and MercadoLibre’s does not respect any calendar, and about how to build a waterfall reconciliation that closes at zero.

why the deposit never matches the sales report

There are three simultaneous misalignments, and mixing them up is what keeps reconciliations from closing.

The first is calendar. Your sales report covers the 1st to the 31st. The deposit covers a period that starts and ends whenever the marketplace decides, and those dates do not move to accommodate your bookkeeping.

The second is content. The sales report carries revenue. The deposit carries revenue minus commissions, minus fulfillment fees, minus storage, minus advertising, minus refunds, plus adjustments in your favor. They are different universes of concepts.

The third is timing. A sale is recorded when the order is created; the money from that sale is released when the marketplace considers the transaction mature — delivered, no open claim, past its reserve window. Days or weeks can pass between the two dates, and in those weeks the order lives in a limbo where it already counts as a sale but does not yet count as money.

A serious reconciliation solves all three. Almost every failed reconciliation I have seen solved only the second: it subtracted commissions and gave up when the number did not land.

Amazon’s settlement cycle and why it ignores your month

Amazon does not pay you by month. It pays you by settlement period, and that period has a life of its own.

The standard scheme is a fourteen-day cycle. At the close of each cycle, Amazon generates a settlement report listing every transaction in the period, computes a total, and triggers a deposit. The key point is that the cycle is anchored to when your account opened or restarted, not to the calendar. A cycle can run from September 3 to 16 and the next from the 17th to the 30th. Your calendar month is cut into pieces belonging to two different cycles, and one of those pieces belongs to the previous month.

On top of the cycle sits a second layer: the reserve. The settlement total is not what reaches the bank. Amazon holds part of it against future returns, claims and chargebacks, and releases earlier reserves. That is how the same report can show a total of three hundred five thousand and a deposit of two hundred ninety-seven thousand: the difference is reserve held minus reserve released.

And there is a third layer worth checking carefully on your own account. Amazon has been shifting the moment when a sale’s funds become eligible for disbursement: in North America a scheme was announced under which an order’s funds become eligible seven calendar days after confirmed delivery, rather than being keyed to the ship date, effective March 2026. That change does not alter how much you earn, but it very much alters when you have it, and it can stretch the distance between sale and deposit by several days. Because these policies are adjusted by region and by account, it is worth confirming in Seller Central which scheme applies to yours before you build a cash-flow model on top of it.

The operational conclusion: to reconcile Amazon, the natural period is not the month, it is the settlement. Forcing it into a calendar month means prorating, and prorating a settlement is the fastest way to make sure the reconciliation never balances again.

Glossary: real net margin, with everything deducted →

MercadoLibre releases money order by order

MercadoLibre runs on the opposite logic, and that trips up anyone coming from Amazon.

There is no period that pools everything and pays at the end. Each sale has its own clock: the money is credited to your Mercado Pago account and released when that specific transaction meets its condition. MercadoLibre Mexico’s public documentation describes that, with seller reputation and a new product, the money becomes available a couple of days after the product is delivered, and that timing changes with the shipping method — a sale shipped outside Mercado Envíos, with no tracking, waits considerably longer, on the order of nineteen days from when the payment was credited.

Two practical consequences follow.

The first is that there is no “period deposit” to compare against. What exists is a balance that moves every day and withdrawals you trigger whenever you want. Comparing your month’s sales against your month’s withdrawals means nothing: withdrawals are a decision of yours, not a result of the business.

The second is that at the close of any month you will hold a block of completed sales whose money is not yet available. That block is real, it is yours, and it has to show up in your reconciliation as a receivable, not as missing money.

The right tool on the Meli side is not the bank statement: it is the reconciliation and settlement reports the platform publishes, which carry the detail of charges tied to each sale and the balance movements. That is where you see why a sale of one thousand one hundred sixty pesos turned into eight hundred ninety-nine sixty.

the concepts that explain nearly the whole gap

Whatever the channel, the gap between sales and deposit is made of the same five blocks. They are worth memorizing because they are the index of any reconciliation:

• Sales commissions. Amazon’s referral fee or MercadoLibre’s commission, with its VAT. Almost always the biggest block.
• Fulfillment fees. FBA or Full per unit, plus storage, plus handling charges, plus the shipping you absorb. Sometimes itemized, sometimes bundled into a single concept.
• Refunds and returns. Careful here: the period’s refunds almost never belong to the period’s sales. They belong to earlier sales and get charged when they happen.
• Advertising. It may be deducted inside the settlement or billed separately to a card. If you do not know which applies to your account, your reconciliation will be off by exactly the amount of your ad spend.
• Reserves, withholdings and taxes. Amazon’s reserve held and released; the tax withholdings the marketplace applies depending on your standing with the tax authority. That last point is educational and depends on your regime and your RFC: confirm it with your accountant before assuming any percentage.

There is a sixth, smaller but annoying block: adjustments. Refunds of fees charged in error, compensation for damaged or lost inventory, claim outcomes. They are small amounts and they appear without warning, and they are the usual reason a reconciliation stays open over two hundred pesos nobody can find.

the method that actually closes: the waterfall

A reconciliation that works does not compare two numbers. It chains a waterfall that starts at sales and ends at the bank, with every intermediate line traceable to a source.

For Amazon, the waterfall is this:

1. Gross sales for the settlement period, taken from the settlement itself, not from your order report.
2. Minus refunds in the period.
3. Minus sales commissions.
4. Minus FBA and storage fees.
5. Minus advertising, if it is deducted there.
6. Plus or minus adjustments.
7. Equals settlement total.
8. Minus reserve held at close, plus reserve released from the prior period.
9. Equals expected deposit.
10. Against the actual bank deposit.

For MercadoLibre, the waterfall runs per sale and then sums:

1. Price charged to the buyer.
2. Minus commission with its VAT.
3. Minus shipping cost you bear.
4. Minus applicable withholdings.
5. Equals amount released for that sale, with its release date.
6. Total released within the month, plus the balance still pending release at close.

One discipline makes it work: every line comes from a report, not from an estimate. The moment someone plugs in an approximate number to make it close, it stops being a reconciliation and becomes an act of faith.

There are five ways to break the waterfall, and they repeat in almost every business:

• Comparing calendar month against settlement. Mistake number one, and it produces huge gaps that then get “explained” with creative theories.
• Assuming the period’s refunds belong to the period’s sales. They never fully do. If you do not tie each refund to its original order, your product-level margin is misallocated across months.
• Forgetting VAT on commissions. The commission is charged with VAT. If you compare against a pre-VAT number, you are short by exactly that sixteen percent and you will go looking for it in the wrong place.
• Not recording the balance pending release. Treating Meli money as if it only existed once withdrawn turns your P&L into a badly built cash-flow statement.
• Ignoring small adjustments. A two-hundred-peso fee refund can cost you two hours if you do not know that line exists. Have an adjustments category from day one.

the example with numbers

Everything below is an invented example so you can see the full mechanics. The arithmetic closes.

A fourteen-day Amazon settlement:

• Gross sales in the period: $486,300
• Refunds in the period: −$38,400
• Sales commissions: −$66,900
• FBA fees: −$41,200
• Storage: −$7,800
• Advertising deducted in the settlement: −$29,500
• Adjustments in your favor: +$3,100
• Settlement total: $305,600
• Reserve held at close: −$52,300
• Reserve released from the prior period: +$44,100
• Expected deposit: $297,400

If your calendar-month sales report said $511,000, the difference against the settlement’s $486,300 is not an error: it is simply that the month and the cycle cover different windows. You should never have subtracted one from the other in the first place.

Now MercadoLibre, with a typical sale:

• Price charged: $1,160
• Commission with VAT (14%): −$162.40
• Shipping cost you bear: −$98
• Released for that sale: $899.60

If you had a hundred identical sales in the month and eighty-four were delivered and released within the month:

• Released in the month: 84 × $899.60 = $75,566.40
• Pending release at close: 16 × $899.60 = $14,393.60
• Total generated by those sales: $89,960

Those $14,393.60 are your MercadoLibre receivable at close. If they do not appear in your reconciliation, your month looks worse than it was and the next one will look better than it will be.

Glossary: real-time sync, data without the lag →

how this reads in iqseller

The Profitability module is built on real movements, not on list price: Amazon settlement commissions and MercadoLibre order commissions, FBA and Full fees, shipping, advertising and the VAT and withholding breakdown, against the COGS you load per SKU. Because each movement is attached to its order, the gap between what was sold and what was settled stops being an opaque aggregate and can be opened down to the order that caused it.

That is exactly what a waterfall reconciliation needs: being able to take the period’s commission line and see which orders it came from, instead of accepting a total on trust.

The Parent → Model → SKU tree in the Catalog also keeps the reconciliation from stopping at account level. When the refund block grows, the useful question is not how much it grew but on which model, and that answer only exists if orders are tied to a real product rather than to three unrelated SKUs nobody linked.

Alerts closes the loop on the time side: hearing that a concept stepped out of its usual behavior on the day it happens is very different from discovering it six weeks later, when the money has moved and the evidence has gone cold.

what to confirm on each platform, and how often

Settlement rules change, and they change quietly. Three habits worth having:

• Check your reserve scheme and cycle calendar in Seller Central at least once a quarter. Your account’s cut-off date and the criterion by which funds become eligible are specific to your account and region.
• Check the current release timelines in MercadoLibre and Mercado Pago help for your shipping method and your reputation, and download the reconciliation reports from there instead of rebuilding them by hand.
• Talk to your accountant about withholdings. What the marketplace withholds depends on your tax regime and your standing with the authority. This post is educational and does not replace that conversation; the percentage that applies to your account is confirmed by whoever keeps your books.

With those three confirmations and the waterfall in place, reconciliation stops being the most dreaded job of the month. It becomes what it always should have been: a twenty-minute check that ends at zero and lets you sleep.