In Advanced Mapping, the final step of the QBs setup process, ConnectBooks gives you an overview of how all the fees that Amazon charges you are imported and deducted from your sales.
Since all transactions ConnectBooks brings into QuickBooks posts is imported within the context of an invoice or credit memo (which is like a bill to amazon for sales of products sold, and a credit for when fees are deducted off theses sales), we need to create service items for these fees to make these deductions (since invoices and credit memos cannot just have an expense on them for fees, unless it is a service item, and items can be linked to an expense account for the same effect). Each service item created is linked to a GL account (General Ledger from your “Chart of Accounts”).
This overview page is only for users to see and review the default setting of how those fees will come in, which item names are in use, and which GL account those service items are mapped to.
(Optional) If you do not want to keep the default settings, then you have the option to customize this section. For example, if a seller already has existing fee items or expense accounts from previously entered Settlements, and wants to keep using those - instead of ConnectBooks creating these new ones.
A look at terms and their meanings
Item - The item name that ConnectBooks creates to map out each fee described
Description - The description given by Amazon, and also used as the item’s description in QBs.
Account Name and Account Type - Outline the GL account names and account types those items are linked to. ConnectBooks creates new service items and new GL accounts for all these fees listed, unless there are already existing items or GL accounts with those exact names. In this case, the fees get mapped to those existing accounts.
To outline any type of fee that Amazon might ever charge your account, the list is very extensive, but ConnectBooks only creates the specific items for fees that are actively used in your Settlements.
ConnectBooks strongly recommends, as a best practice, to keep the default settings in mappings for fees, as this was developed by professional accountants.
To bring in fees differently and customize the mapping settings, customers have two options:
Option 1 and Best Practice -
Allow ConnectBooks to create and import the outlined service items. They can then go into those items in QBs and switch out the linked GL account to their preferred choice. This also allows you to backdate this change to any time this item was used previously, and automatically update those with the newly linked account as well.
Option 2: Below Name Alternative, select your own service item from a drop-down menu of the existing items in QBs. Note - Only your existing items with the item type “Service Item” appear, any other item such as “Other Charge” or “Inventory” do not appear in the drop-down list. So if you want to create your own fee items, or already have your own existing fee items, make sure the type is set to Service.