Amazon reporting a board can check.

The first thing a board needs from an Amazon report is one sales figure, named, that it can check. Amazon does not supply one. It supplies at least three, and they disagree for good reasons. There are ordered sales in Seller Central Business Reports, counted on the day the customer ordered. There are advertising-attributed sales, which Amazon credits to an ad under what its own advertising FAQ calls "a last-touch attribution model", inside a lookback window that Amazon's attribution guide sets at 7 days for a seller's Sponsored Products and 14 days for Sponsored Brands and Display. And there is the money that reaches your bank. Amazon's UK selling site puts that plainly: it "will charge the credit card to cover your fees, and proceeds from any sales will be deposited into your bank account". In general, Amazon settles seller accounts every two weeks, and holds part of the balance in reserve to cover refunds and chargebacks.

None of the three is wrong, but a board pack that moves between them cannot be checked. So pick the headline figure, name it on the page, and reconcile the other two to it underneath. Ours is Ordered Product Sales as reported in Seller Central Business Reports, and the reason is commercial rather than technical: it is the figure our commission is calculated on. The number on our invoice is the number at the top of your board page, and anyone on the board with Seller Central access can find it themselves.

Advertising-attributed sales then belong one line down, labelled as Amazon's attribution rather than as revenue. They overlap ordered sales rather than adding to them, so they should never be summed with them. Two more reasons to keep them apart come from that same attribution guide. "In campaign reports, sales are reported on the ad interaction date, which may differ from the actual sale date", so the advertising figure for any week can keep rising for up to 14 days after the week has closed. And "attributed sales don’t include tax. Inclusive tax such as VAT is subtracted from sales totals." Amazon publishes no equivalent public statement for Business Reports, so before the two figures sit on one page in front of a UK or European board, check in your own Seller Central which basis each one is on.

The second question in any boardroom is what the growth cost. On Amazon the cleanest answer is total advertising cost of sale, or TACOS: all advertising spend divided by all sales, organic included. It belongs on the same line as the growth figure rather than on a later page, because a growth number with no efficiency number beside it is half a story. Any account can grow if it is willing to lose money doing it.

The pair we publish is the one we would want a board to ask us for. On Ancient + Brave, sales grew 160% into 2025 while TACOS held at 14.6% as revenue more than doubled. Either figure alone would have been a weaker claim. Growth without the 14.6% could have been bought; a 14.6% without the growth could have been a brand spending too little to matter. What a good TACOS is for your own margin is a separate question, answered from your gross margin rather than a published benchmark, set out here.

If you sell on more than one marketplace, report each on its own line in its own currency, then a converted total with the exchange rate and the date stated. A US line in dollars converted silently into pounds moves with the exchange rate, and a board will read that as trading.

Between ordered sales and contribution sit costs a board will not see unless the report puts them there. The first is Amazon's own cut. Its UK selling site says a referral fee is charged on each item sold, that the amount depends on the category, and that "most referral fees are between 8% and 15%". Fulfilment fees come next if you use Fulfilment by Amazon, then advertising spend, refunds, and whatever you pay the people running the account.

So the P&L line we build runs in that order: ordered sales, less referral and fulfilment fees, less advertising, less refunds, less management fees, to a contribution figure a finance director can put next to every other channel. Our own fee sits in it at its real size, because it is published and charged on sales rather than on advertising spend. Advertising itself is paid by you, directly to Amazon, so it appears once and never twice.

The forecast is built from the same lines, and it carries one more that most channel forecasts leave out: weeks of stock cover. Our view is that on Amazon a stock-out costs more than the weeks you are out, because it interrupts the sales history that ranking is built on, and the months after a stock-out are usually spent buying that position back. A forecast that shows sales growing while cover falls is describing a problem, and the report should say so before the board finds out.

Buyers price dependence on Amazon openly. CT Acquisitions, an M&A advisory firm, wrote in May 2026 that "Amazon-only FBA businesses, even profitable ones, trade at 2.5-4x SDE because of platform-concentration risk and supplier dependency", against "often 4-6x SDE at the $1-3M revenue level" for direct-to-consumer brands with strong organic traffic and repeat-purchase economics. SDE is seller's discretionary earnings, a profit measure used for owner-run businesses. The exact multiples will move from year to year, but the direction is what matters here: an acquirer's questions about an Amazon channel are questions about how much of it depends on Amazon, and how exposed it is to the ad-cost inflation the same page lists among the risks buyers underwrite.

Three things are cheaper to fix before the question arrives than after it. The history should run back to the start on the same definitions, so the first year and the latest one are measured the same way. The advertising accounts should sit under the brand's own entity rather than an agency's, which is the same ownership question we set out for DSP seats and applies to every advertising account. And the share of sales coming from repeat and subscription customers should be stated, because it is the part of an Amazon channel that does not have to be bought again. On Ancient + Brave, subscriptions reached 25-30% of monthly revenue.

The reporting discipline covers six things, and they are listed on the services page in the same words: board-level performance reporting, forecasting and P&L modelling, investor updates and growth narratives, due-diligence support, channel strategy for fundraising, and quarterly business reviews. Underneath them sit weekly performance reporting and a monthly strategy call. Our view is that board material should be built from those weekly numbers rather than assembled separately the week before a meeting, so the two cannot drift apart.

It is not sold as an extra. Reporting is one of the five disciplines the published fee covers, alongside strategy, operations, full-funnel PPC and DSP where it is warranted. It is founder-led, which at this size means the person who sets the strategy is the person who looks at the account, so the answer to a board member's follow-up question does not have to be relayed.

This is the page we would put in front of a board, and you can use it whether or not you ever hire us. The top line is ordered sales for the period, named as ordered sales, against plan and against the same period last year. Beside it, TACOS. Below it, advertising-attributed sales labelled as Amazon's attribution, then the reconciliation to cash with fees, advertising and refunds shown. Then weeks of stock cover on the products that make up most of the sales. Then one sentence on what changed and one on what happens next. If a report cannot fill those lines from Seller Central, it is not ready for a board.

If you would like to see how your own account reads on that page before a board does, that is part of what the free audit covers. What the work costs afterwards is on the pricing page, in dollars as well as pounds.