Of all the mistakes that bend an Amazon VAT return, the most expensive one is also the easiest to make: treating the fees Amazon charges you as if they were part of your sales. They sit in the same file, in the same columns, looking much the same — and they are nothing like it.
This guide explains where the fees sit inside the report, why they arrive a month behind, why they are never added to your taxable base, and what changes depending on which Amazon entity invoices them.
Where the fees sit inside the report
For some time now, the VAT transactions report has carried Amazon's fees in the same file as your sales. There is no separate report to download: you have to know how to tell them apart.
Two columns identify them:
SALES_CHANNELwith the valueAMAZON_FEE. That is the marker. Everything carrying it is a fee Amazon charges you, not a sale you made.ACTIVITY_PERIOD, which tells you which month each fee belongs to. That column matters more than it looks, because it almost never matches the month of the report you are looking at.
Everything else in the file — the country of departure, the country of arrival, the rate — is still there, but for a fee it does not mean what it means for a sale. A fee is not dispatched from any warehouse.
The one-month lag, and the empty months
Amazon invoices its fees a month in arrears. In the July report you will find the fees invoiced for June. It is not an anomaly, nor a faulty download: it is their calendar.
Two situations follow from that, and both are normal even though both alarm you the first time:
- The activity period of the fees does not match the month of the report. That is what you should expect, precisely because of the lag.
- There are months with no fees at all. It happens. A report without a single
AMAZON_FEErow is not broken, nor incomplete by definition.
What is worth knowing, and is the part almost nobody sees coming: the report may not contain every fee invoice for that month. The report's window cuts by document, not by family of documents, so within one family an invoice can make it in while another is left out.
The practical consequence is direct: if you are going to use these figures for input VAT, the report is not the complete source. Seller Central's Tax Document Library is, and that is what you have to check against.
Why they are never added to your sales
This is mistake number one, and it deserves working through, because the damage it does is silent.
Fees are not income of yours. They are a cost invoiced by a supplier that happens to also be your sales channel. If you put them in the same bucket as your sales:
- You inflate your taxable base, because you are declaring as sales something you never sold.
- You inflate the VAT, because that base is what the VAT comes out of.
- And the damage grows the more your fees weigh against your sales: it is not a fixed-size error, it is an error proportional to your own business.
That is why they go in a block of their own, separated by construction rather than by a rule somebody has to remember to apply. A fee never enters a sales block.
Who invoices the fee, and why that changes everything
This is the part that generates the most questions, and also the one where you have to be most careful about what you take for granted.
There are two different regimes, depending on the date of the fee:
- Until 31 July 2024, the fees were invoiced from Luxembourg, by Amazon EU S.à r.l., without VAT, and the seller established in Spain self-assessed them under the reverse charge.
- From 1 August 2024, Amazon invoices from its local branch with local VAT.
The difference is not a nuance: the two regimes produce opposite entries. Under one the invoice carries no VAT and you are the one who self-assesses it; under the other the invoice carries VAT you have already been charged. What to do with each in your return — what you self-assess, what you deduct and on what conditions — is no longer reading the report: it is tax judgement, and that is what the end of this guide is about.
One warning that comes from having got it wrong before: a fee invoiced at a 0 % rate does not automatically mean the reverse charge. That reading is a hypothesis, not a fact from the report. The report gives you the rate; it does not give you the reason. A row like that gets looked into, not classified by ear.
How the reader handles all this
If you upload the CSV to our free VAT reader, you do not have to hunt for the fees: they come out already separated, in their own input VAT block, and they never enter any sales total.
On top of that, it:
- Keeps the two regimes apart, without merging them into one total, because they are not interchangeable.
- Tells you when the fees belong to the previous month, in those words, instead of leaving you to work it out.
- Flags fees prior to August 2024, which fall under the reverse charge.
- Flags a fee invoiced at 0 % with no explanation, and leaves the row exposed instead of inventing a reason for it.
- Tells you to check against the Tax Document Library when the lag means the report's window may not carry everything.
- Never mixes currencies: each block stays in its own.
It is free and needs no sign-up to see the summary on screen, and the file never leaves your computer.
And how far this guide goes
Everything above is reading the report: which row is what, which month it comes from, and what cannot be added to what. That can be checked, which is why it is written here.
What is not reading the report but tax judgement — how each regime is treated in your return — is your tax adviser's work, with your case in front of them. A well-read, properly separated report is the best starting point you can hand them; it is not a substitute for their review.