A practical guide to Amazon India MTR reconciliation

Amazon India's Merchant Tax Report (MTR) is deceptively detailed. It carries every order, every commission component, every fee, every tax line — enough information to reconcile cleanly, and enough detail to hide real variance in plain sight. Most sellers reconcile the MTR once a month, take 3–6 hours doing it, and still miss the things that actually cost them money.

This guide is the workflow we recommend to sellers moving off spreadsheet reconciliation. It assumes you've got the MTR, the bank statement, and a rate-card document that lists the commission percentages you negotiated by category. If you don't have the rate card, that's step one — without it, you can't verify variance.

Step one: reconcile the MTR total to the bank credit. The MTR has a net-settlement line that should correspond to a single bank credit. If the total doesn't match (within a tolerance for Amazon's rounding), the reconciliation is broken before it starts. This catches the rare-but-catastrophic case where a settlement was reversed or delayed.

Step two: verify commission variance per order. For each settled order, the actual commission charged should equal (product category commission rate) × (MRP − discounts). Category misclassification is surprisingly common — a seasonal apparel item getting classified as standard apparel can mean a 3–5 percentage point commission swing. Small per order, but it compounds.

Step three: verify closing fee and shipping fee components. Closing fee is a flat charge Amazon applies based on order value slabs. If your rate card says closing fee is ₹10 for orders below ₹500, and you see ₹15 on an order where MRP is ₹380, you have variance. Similarly, shipping fee is weight-banded — verify the weight slab charged matches the declared product weight.

Step four: reconcile COD remittances separately. Amazon remits COD on a different cycle than prepaid. The MTR lists COD orders with their remittance status; cross-check against the bank for actual remittance receipt. Any COD order older than 14 days without remittance is an exception worth contesting.

Step five: match returns and RTOs back to original orders. Returns appear in later MTR periods as negative line items. Link each return to the original order by order ID, and verify the refund amount matches the original settlement minus any allowed deductions for return shipping. Cases where the deduction exceeds the rate card's allowance are disputable.

Doing all five manually at scale is where reconciliation tools earn their keep. ReconPe handles all five automatically once the rate card is uploaded — typical review time drops from 3–6 hours per cycle to under 30 minutes, with higher accuracy than manual because the engine doesn't get tired on row 2,000.