How Amazon’s Standard Base Reserve Policy affects your transaction data in FreeAgent
This article explains how Amazon’s Standard Base Reserve Policy affects the timing of their payouts to sellers, and what that means for FreeAgent customers using our Amazon integration.
We have been made aware that Amazon UK sellers on the Amazon Standard Base Reserve Policy - also referred to as ‘Delivery Date Based Reserve’ or ‘DD+7’ - will only see funds from their Amazon sales become available seven days after the delivery date of a sale. Until then, the funds being held in reserve will be referred to as ‘Deferred transactions’ on your Amazon payments dashboard.
If you are on the Amazon Standard Base Reserve Policy, this also means that the date at which your transactions appear in your FreeAgent Amazon bank account - and the date marked on any invoices and bills - will also be approximately seven days after the delivery date.
Why is there a delay?
Sales data is currently not available for FreeAgent to import until Amazon releases the funds seven days after delivery.
We’re working on a solution to update the way we import your Amazon sales data. By early 2025 the date marked on invoices and bills associated with Amazon sales will be updated to reflect the delivery date of a sale. However, the date of associated transactions within your FreeAgent Amazon bank account will not change as they will reflect the date that funds become available from Amazon.
What do you need to do?
In many cases you won’t need to take any immediate action. We’ll let you know when the update goes live and all sales-related invoices and bills from that date onwards will be marked with the delivery date.
However, until the update goes live, depending on when your accounting year and your VAT return periods end, you may wish to include income, costs and VAT in different accounting or VAT periods than they will appear in from the dates of the transactions in the FreeAgent Amazon bank account.
If you’re not sure which invoices or bills may fall into specific accounting periods, or the impact on your VAT returns, then we recommend speaking to your accountant or bookkeeper for guidance.
If you would like to make adjustments, you can do that by creating journal entries. Find out how to move income from one accounting period to another and how to accrue for costs in an earlier period.
VAT adjustments
You can see on which VAT return FreeAgent has included VAT on particular sales and costs by going to Taxes > VAT > choose the VAT return where you believe the VAT is > select the ‘Full Report’ tab and look for the transaction in question. Find out more about how to review a VAT return.
If you need to include VAT on sales in a different period to the one FreeAgent includes it in, then you would create the following journal entries for the value of the VAT in question:
- Dated in the period in which you need to include the VAT; Debit account '823 - Deferred VAT', Credit account '819 VAT - Charged'
- Dated in the period in which FreeAgent has posted the VAT; Debit account '819 VAT - Charged', Credit account '823 - Deferred VAT'
Conversely, if you need to include VAT on costs in a different period to the one FreeAgent includes it in, then you would create the following journal entries for the value of the VAT in question;
- Dated in the period in which you need to include the VAT; Debit account '818 - VAT Reclaimed', Credit account '823 - Deferred VAT'
- Dated in the period in which FreeAgent has posted the VAT; Debit account '823 - Deferred VAT', Credit account '818 - VAT Reclaimed'
We will update our customers again once the update goes live.