Lifetimely vs. Amazon Reporting: The Key Difference | Understanding Financial Reports

Help Article: Why Your Amazon Dashboard and Lifetimely Numbers Don't Match

If you have ever tried to match the "Ordered Product Sales" number at the top of your Amazon Seller Central dashboard with the "Total Sales" line in your Lifetimely Income Statement, you have likely noticed they almost never agree.

This guide explains why these two systems report different numbers, why you often see a ~1% variance, and the exact formula you need to use to reconcile them.

The Core Difference: "Gross" vs. "Net"

The fundamental reason for the mismatch is that these two systems are answering different questions.

• Amazon's "Ordered Product Sales" is a Gross (Optimistic) metric. It answers: "What is the total value of orders placed today?"
  • Includes: The full selling price of the item.
  • Excludes: Sales Tax (usually) and Refunds.
  • Logic: If a customer buys a $100 item today, Amazon reports $100 immediately. If they return it next week, Amazon usually does not change today's number.
• Lifetimely's "Total Sales" is a Net (Realistic) financial metric. It answers: "How much money did we actually earn after adjustments?"
  • Includes: Sales Tax and Shipping Revenue.
  • Subtracts: Refunds and Discount Codes.
  • Logic: Lifetimely tries to give you a "bank-ready" number. If that $100 item had $5 in tax and a $10 refund later (depending on your refund logic setting), Lifetimely’s total will be different from Amazon’s initial $100 figure.

The "Time Zone Swing" (The 1% Variance)

You will often see a daily variance of roughly 1% that "flip-flops" (one day Lifetimely is higher, the next day Amazon is higher).

• Amazon Seller Central is hard-coded to display data in Pacific Standard Time (PST).
• Lifetimely (and most APIs) receives data in UTC (Universal Time) or converts it to your Shopify Store Time (often EST).

The Result: A sale that happens at 11:00 PM PST on Dec 8th counts as Dec 8th for Amazon, but might be recorded as 2:00 AM EST on Dec 9th for Lifetimely. Over a week or month, these differences cancel each other out, but on any single day, they create that annoying ~1% drift.

The Reconciliation Formula

To make the numbers tie out, you must strip the "extra" financial data out of Lifetimely to match Amazon's raw "Gross" view.

Use this formula on your Lifetimely Breakdown:

Why this works:

1. Ignore "Total Sales": Do not use the top-line "Total Sales" row in Lifetimely, as it includes Tax and subtracts Refunds/Discounts.
2. Ignore Refunds: Amazon's dashboard does not subtract returns from the daily sales view, so you shouldn't either.
3. Subtract Taxes: Lifetimely adds collected tax to revenue; Amazon's dashboard generally excludes it.

By comparing this calculated number to Amazon, your variance should drop to <1%, with the remaining difference purely due to the time zone cut-off.