If you’re an amazon seller you should make sure you run a year-end inventory report.  Most sellers basically “expense” all the items they purchase during the year, which is fine, however we need to reduce that amount by the cost of the inventory you have at the end of the year.  In this post I’m going to show you how you should do that.

High Level: Sales – Cost of Good Sold = Gross Profit

To figure out your Costs of Good Sold = Starting Inventory + Purchases Made During the Year – Ending Inventory = Cost of Good Sold during the year.

Example: You start with $0 inventory.  You buy $1,000 worth of product and you end the year with $200 cost of inventory your Cost of Goods Sold will be $800 ($0+$1,000-$200).  The next year say you buy $2,000 and end the year with $100 in inventory.  Your Cost of Good Sold would be $200 + $2,000 – $100 = $2100.

To get a good inventory report from seller central try this.

1. Log into seller central
2. Go to Reports, then Fulfillment
3. Under Inventory on the left, select show more and then Monthly Inventory History.
4. Select Download, then the event month. If your doing this after January, then select the exact months of December 2019 to December 2019.
5. This will export a TXT file. Open this file in excel and import it.  It will format if you open it correctly.
6. You will need to create a column Purchase Price. This should be the price for each item you have bought and the cost, not selling price.
7. Then just multiply the cost by the number of units and you’ll get the value of your inventory.

Now you have an ending inventory value for your amazon unsold inventory!  If you’d like to discuss amazon information more, please contact us for tax preparation and amazon consulting.