Where did your FBA units go? Read the Inventory Ledger row by row

A few days ago we wrote about the Reimbursements report, which shows what Amazon paid you for lost or damaged stock. That report only lists what has already been settled. The units that went missing and have not been settled yet are in a different report: the Inventory Ledger.

The ledger works like a bank statement for your FBA stock. Every row is one movement, with a date, a product, a quantity and a reason. Every claim below points at a column in it. We checked the claims on the ledgers of ten sellers: almost 13,000 rows over eleven months.

Where the report is

In Seller Central it is in the Reports menu, under Fulfillment, as the Inventory Ledger, in the detailed view. Through the API it is GET_LEDGER_DETAIL_VIEW_DATA.

The columns:

  • Date. When the movement happened.
  • FNSKU, ASIN, MSKU, Title. Which product.
  • Event Type. What kind of movement it was.
  • Reference ID. The identifier of the order, shipment or adjustment.
  • Quantity. How many units, with a sign: negative means the units left your stock.
  • Fulfillment Center, Country. Which warehouse, and which country it is in.
  • Disposition. The condition of the units: SELLABLE, or one of the unsellable groups.
  • Reason. A short code that says why an adjustment happened.
  • Reconciled Quantity, Unreconciled Quantity. How much of the movement has been settled, and how much is still open.

Six kinds of movement

The Event Type column had six values in the ledgers we checked:

  • Shipments. Units sent to customers. Always negative.
  • Receipts. Units received into the warehouse. Mostly positive, but 113 of 460 rows were negative. Each of those had the same Reference ID as a positive receipt of the same product: a correction to that receipt.
  • CustomerReturns. Units a customer sent back. Always one unit, always positive.
  • VendorReturns. Units taken out of the warehouse by a removal. Always negative.
  • WhseTransfers. Units moved between Amazon warehouses.
  • Adjustments. Everything else, each row with a reason code.

The transfers are the easiest to misread. They are recorded under a shared Reference ID, with negative rows where units leave a warehouse and positive rows where they arrive. Of 97 transfer references, 86 added up to exactly zero, and across all 5,804 transfer rows the total was minus 8 units. A long list of negative transfer rows is not a loss.

Country means the warehouse, not your store

The Country column is the country of the fulfillment center. A seller who sells only in Germany can still have rows from Poland or the Czech Republic, because Amazon stores some stock there. The rows we checked came from nine countries.

If you sum the ledger by country to match it against one marketplace, you will be off. Sum by product instead.

Only four codes are ever settled

The Reason column holds a one-character code on Adjustments rows. We saw eleven codes. Seller Central help for the Inventory Ledger explains what each letter means.

You need the legend less than you would think, because the data splits the codes into two groups:

  • E, F, M and N. On every one of these 137 rows, Reconciled Quantity plus Unreconciled Quantity equalled the number of units in the row. These are the movements Amazon tracks until they are settled.
  • Every other code. On all 217 rows, both columns were zero. These movements are never tracked as open or settled in this report.

That changes how you filter. If you look for Unreconciled Quantity greater than zero, you will only ever see the first group. A zero in the column does not mean settled. It can also mean the code is not tracked at all.

Not every negative row gets tracked

The untracked group is not small, and much of it takes units away. Code Q was negative on all 72 of its rows, code D on all 30, and three rarer codes added another 12 negative rows. None of these 114 rows ever had an open quantity.

A filter on Unreconciled Quantity will never bring them up. Look up the letter in the help legend, and if it describes units you should have been paid for, check them against the Reimbursements report yourself, the same way as the open rows below.

The open rows are your work list

Filter the Adjustments rows where Unreconciled Quantity is greater than zero. In the ledgers we checked, these rows split in two:

  • Negative rows (E and M). Units that left your stock and have not been settled yet. Look up the same FNSKU in the Reimbursements report. If there is no payment there, and the date is old enough that Amazon should have acted, this is the row to open a case about.
  • Positive rows (mostly F). Units Amazon found but has not matched against an earlier loss in the report. 20 of the 33 found rows were still open, some of them more than ten months old. If you were already paid for a loss and the unit turns up again, Amazon can take the payment back. The Reimbursements report shows these as Reimbursement_Reversal rows.

Every Adjustments row had a Reference ID. Copy it into the case, so the person reading it can find the exact movement.

Twenty minutes a month

Download the detailed Inventory Ledger for the last three months. Keep the Adjustments rows and sort them by Unreconciled Quantity, the largest at the top. Put the negative rows with untracked codes in a separate list.

For every negative row with an open quantity, look up the FNSKU in the Reimbursements report. Paid: done. Not paid: open a case with the Reference ID. For every positive row with an open quantity, check whether you were paid for that product earlier. If you were, expect a reversal, so it does not surprise you on your next statement. And go through the separate list once, with the help legend open: you only need to learn which of those letters matter to you one time.