If you sell on Amazon and file VAT in Spain, there is one file that outranks all the others: the VAT transactions report — the report Amazon names "Informe de transacciones sujetas a IVA" in the Spanish console. It is the only Seller Central report that gathers, transaction by transaction, what you need for your returns — and also the one most often confused with other reports that look like it and are of no use.
This guide explains what it is, exactly where to download it, what it contains, what it does not, and the mistakes we see repeated month after month.
What it is and what it is for
Every month Amazon produces a report with every transaction on your account that matters for VAT: sales, refunds, movements of your stock between warehouses in Europe and, for some time now, the fees Amazon charges you as well. Each row is one transaction, with its taxable base, its VAT amount, its VAT rate, its departure and arrival countries, and the VAT numbers (NIF-IVA) involved.
It is the raw material of your returns: of the Spanish VAT return (modelo 303), of the OSS return (modelo 369) if you are registered for the One-Stop Shop (OSS), and of the recapitulative statement (modelo 349) if you carry out intra-EU transactions. It is not the return — it is the detail the return is built from.
One warning Amazon itself puts on the report page, and one worth taking seriously: the report is provided for information purposes only, and checking that it is accurate before you file anything with it is your responsibility.
Where to download it, step by step
The report lives in Seller Central's Report Central, in the section Amazon labels "Informes de Logística de Amazon" — its Fulfilment by Amazon reports — under the literal name "Informe de transacciones sujetas a IVA". If you would rather go straight there, this is the URL:
https://sellercentral.amazon.es/reportcentral/VAT_TRANSACTION/1
(it will ask you to log in and leave you on the report page).
Once you are there:
- Choose the activity month in the dropdown.
- Press the request button, labelled "Solicitar descarga en .csv" — request the .csv download. It is not an immediate download: Amazon generates the file and leaves it in the table at the bottom of the same page when it is ready, usually within a few minutes.
- Download the file from that table.
Two things that save you a fright:
- Last month's report is available from the 3rd of the current month. If July is not there on the 1st, nothing is broken: it does not exist yet.
- Do not open the CSV in Excel before using it. Opening and saving it strips the leading zeros from your MSKUs, ASINs and FNSKUs — Amazon says so on the download page itself. If you need to look at it, look at a copy.
What is inside
Each row of the report is a transaction, and the transaction type column tells you which kind: sales, refunds, and inventory movements between fulfilment centres (if you are on the pan-European programme you will see a lot of these — they are your own stock transfers between countries, and they have their own treatment).
There is also something relatively recent: the report now includes Amazon's fee transactions — the commissions — in the same file. You identify them by filtering the SALES_CHANNEL column on the value AMAZON_FEE, and the ACTIVITY_PERIOD column tells you which month each fee belongs to.
That last detail matters more than it looks: Amazon invoices its fees one month in arrears. In the July report you will find the fees invoiced for June. And there are months in which no fee invoice arrives at all — that is not an error in the report, it is Amazon's billing calendar.
On the figures: the report carries amounts in each marketplace's currency, and when it converts a VAT amount it includes its own exchange rate. You will also see curious rows, such as units from the Vine programme — free samples that have their own tax treatment (supplies free of charge) and must not be mixed in with your sales.
What it does NOT contain (and what it is not)
It does not necessarily contain every invoice for the period. Amazon can issue invoices that do not appear in the monthly report's window. If you reconcile your accounts against this file, cross-check it as well against Seller Central's Tax Document Library, where the invoices sit as documents.
It is not the VAT summary. Seller Central also offers a summary VAT report, aggregated by country and rate. For getting a rough sense of your month it may do; for preparing a return with detail and traceability it will not: you need the transaction-by-transaction file, which is this one.
It is not the orders report, nor the payments report. The orders report measures commercial activity (what was sold); the payments report (settlement) measures money flows (what Amazon paid you and when). Neither of the two is built for VAT purposes. They are the two files that most often reach us by mistake instead of the right one.
The mistakes that bend the most returns
1. Adding the fees to your sales. The Amazon fees that now come in the same file are not income of yours: they are costs with their own input VAT (and, depending on the period and which Amazon entity issues the invoice, under the reverse charge). Mixing them in with your sales inflates both your taxable base and your VAT — and the more your fees weigh against your sales, the greater the damage.
2. Applying the country's "standard" rate instead of the real rate on each row. The report carries the rate of every transaction, and it is not always the general rate of the country of destination: there are reduced rates, and there are rows where the rate on the items and the rate on the shipping differ and what the row describes is the effective rate. A return is filed with the real rate, not with the one that "ought to be".
3. Ignoring the country of departure. If you hold stock in Italy or Germany (the pan-European programme), a sale dispatched from Italy to a Spanish customer is not a Spanish domestic sale, and declaring it as one is a mistake with consequences in two countries. The report tells you where each shipment left from — you have to look.
4. Mixing currencies. If you sell across several marketplaces, you will have rows in euros, pounds and other currencies. Each block is worked in its own currency, and conversions are made on a defined basis (for the AEAT, the Spanish tax agency, at the official exchange rate that applies) — never by adding up figures in different currencies as if they were the same thing.
From the report to your return
The report is the detail; the return is the structure. Between the two there is a job of classification: separating domestic sales from OSS country by country, exempt intra-EU supplies, exports, refunds, fees as input VAT, and spotting what does not fit instead of letting it slip through.
You can do that work by hand — or you can upload the CSV to our free VAT reader, which classifies it inside your own browser (the file never leaves your computer), structures it into the blocks the return is going to ask for, and flags what deserves a check. It is free and needs no sign-up to see the summary on screen.
And if what you need is a professional to review and file, that remains your tax adviser's work — a well-read report is the best starting point you can hand them.