Not sure this is necessary the correct forum for this - but hopefully someone will point me in the right direction for the following:
I use the paid Amazon integration. Whenever it creates a bill for Amazon’s fees, every line goes to Cost of Sales (nominal 101) — referral fees, FBA fulfilment, storage, and advertising spend alike.
Advertising isn’t a cost of sale. FreeAgent’s own nominal ranges make the point: 100–199 is Cost of Sales, 200–399 is Admin Expenses, and Advertising and Promotion is 288. The integration is posting an admin expense into the cost of sales range.
The practical effect for anyone running PPC:
- Cost of Sales is inflated by the full amount of ad spend, so gross profit and gross margin % are understated. Because advertising sits below the gross profit line and cost of sales above it, the two errors don’t cancel — they only reconcile at net profit.
- Advertising and Promotion (288) shows zero, so there’s no visibility of ad spend in the P&L at all.
For me that’s several points of phantom margin error, which makes the P&L unusable without manual correction. At the moment the only fixes are editing every bill by hand, or posting a monthly reclassification journal from 101 to 288.
The information needed to do this properly is already in the data - Amazon’s settlement/finances data separates “Cost of Advertising” from referral and fulfilment fees as its own transaction type. The integration appears to be flattening that distinction rather than lacking it.
Could this be looked at? Either of these would solve it:
- Map advertising charges to 288 by default.
- Better: expose a fee-type → category mapping so users can decide where each Amazon fee type posts. That would also cover fee types I haven’t hit yet.
I’ve searched the forum and can’t find this raised before, which I suspect is because a lot of the add-on’s users don’t run ads. For those of us who do, advertising is often the second largest cost line after product cost, so it isn’t a niche case.
Has anyone else worked around this, other than by journal?