A finance and recovery agent for reimbursements, fees and payouts

Amazon now pays many FBA reimbursements without a claim, and that changes what a recovery tool is for. The money that still leaks sits in the cases automation misses, in fees charged on the wrong size tier, in reimbursements paid below your cost, and in settlements nobody ties back to the bank. Below is the finance and recovery agent we build and deploy on a brand's own accounts: what it watches, which report proves each claim, what your team still does in Seller Central, and when a reimbursement service or an off-the-shelf tool is the better choice.

What does a finance and recovery agent do?

It does three jobs that usually sit with three different people or vendors. Recovery: finding FBA units that were lost, damaged, never returned or received short, that Amazon has not paid for, and preparing the claim. Fee audit: checking the fees Amazon charged against the fees your products should carry, and the reimbursements it paid against your sourcing cost. Reconciliation: tying each settlement to the deposit in your bank, and each 3PL count and invoice to what actually moved. All three read the same data, which is why we build them as one agent.

Amazon has taken over part of the first job. In a July 2024 post, it said that from November 1, 2024 it would proactively reimburse FBA items lost in its fulfillment centers as soon as they are reported lost, and that almost all warehouse lost-and-damaged and customer return cases would be reimbursed without a claim (Amazon's announcement in the Seller Forums, checked September 25, 2026). The same post says anything not reimbursed automatically still needs a manual claim, and every removal claim is still filed by hand. So the agent's job has shifted from filing volume to checking: confirming what was paid, catching what was missed, and challenging what was paid at the wrong value.

The agent starts from the reimbursements module in Ecomsellertool Growth OS, which covers lost, damaged and misplaced units and fee overcharges "detected line by line, with claims prepared and tracked." We add the settlement and 3PL checks, the model steps and the rules your finance team sets. Our FBA reimbursements page explains how recovery works when you do it by hand; this page is about the software that does it every day. It is one of the AI agents we build on a brand's own accounts.

How does it find reimbursable units and fee overcharges?

Every day it pulls the reports that describe each unit's life at Amazon through the Selling Partner API, with the access you authorize. Amazon's FBA report documentation describes them (checked September 25, 2026): the Inventory Ledger detail view, with receipts, shipments, returns and adjustments such as lost, found and damaged units over 18 months; the Reimbursements report, updated daily, with each reimbursement's reason; the FBA Returns report, with each return's disposition; the removal order and removal shipment detail reports, with carrier and tracking; and the FBA Fee Preview, with the dimensions, size and weight band and estimated fees for each SKU with an active offer, which can be requested once a day.

Detection is mostly matching. For each FNSKU and event, the agent nets the units lost, damaged, received short or never returned against units later found and units Amazon already reimbursed, in cash or in inventory. It matches on the identifiers each report shares, such as FNSKU, order ID, shipment ID and removal order ID, because no single Amazon report tells the whole story of a unit. Whatever is left is an open case:

Open case = units lost, damaged, received short or not returned − units found − units already reimbursed

Open cases are not claimed at once. Each one is held until its window opens and ranked by the days left before it closes. A customer refunded on October 1 whose item never came back becomes claimable on November 30 and stays claimable until January 29. Holding matters for two reasons: Amazon's rules set the earliest day a return or removal claim can be filed, and premature requests are one of the behaviors its policy warns about. Some held cases resolve on their own before the window opens, because the item comes back or Amazon pays it.

The fee audit compares two numbers for each unit sold: the FBA fulfillment fee in your settlement lines, and the rate your product should carry. Amazon's FBA fulfillment fee page says the rate depends on product type, size tier and shipping weight. Its 2026 US fee changes page adds price bands (under $10, $10 to $50, over $50), a 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge from April 17, 2026, and holiday peak rates from October 15, 2026 to January 14, 2027 (both checked September 25, 2026).

The fee is charged when the unit leaves the fulfillment center, so an order placed on October 10 that ships on October 16 pays the peak rate. The agent prices each unit at your measured dimensions and weight, the item's price and its ship date, so a fee that rises for units shipped from October 15 is read as the peak rate card, not a measuring error.

Candidate fee overcharge per unit = fulfillment fee charged − expected fee for your measured size tier and shipping weight, at the same price band and ship date, surcharge included

A gap is a candidate, not a claim. Amazon's weight and dimensions fee policy says its own verified measurement governs over yours, a request must arrive within 90 days of the charge, and one request per FNSKU covers all its orders (checked September 25, 2026). A product cannot be remeasured if no units are available in a fulfillment center, if it was remeasured twice in the past 60 days, or if your account has used its monthly request limit, so the agent flags those cases instead of queuing them. The policy names the Monthly Storage Fees and Aged Inventory Surcharge reports as sources of the dimensions Amazon used, and the agent reads those alongside the Fee Preview.

Settlement rows give a second fee check. When you refund a buyer, Amazon's fee schedule says it refunds the referral fee minus a refund administration fee of the lesser of $5.00 or 20% of that referral fee (checked September 25, 2026). On a $40.00 refund in a category with a 15% referral fee, the referral fee is $6.00, the administration fee is $1.20, and the credit should be $4.80. The agent recomputes that for every refund row and flags refunds where the referral fee credit is missing or short.

Most of this is rules: the matching, the claim windows, the rate-card arithmetic and the refund fee check. A language model is used only where the data is messy. It reads supplier invoices, packing slips and carrier proofs of delivery, which arrive as PDFs and photos, pulls out dates, product names and quantities, matches invoice product names to your SKUs when your supplier calls the product something else, and drafts the claim description. A person checks every draft before anything reaches Amazon.

Which report proves each claim, and what does your team do?

This is the table the agent works from. Each row is a case type under Amazon's FBA inventory reimbursement policy and its pages for shipments to Amazon, fulfillment center operations, customer returns and removals, plus the fee policy for wrong weight or dimensions, all US rules checked September 25, 2026. The agent does the second, third and fourth columns. The last column is what a person on your team does.

Two rules shape how the queue is built. Amazon accepts one claim per inbound shipment and one per fee charge, so those packets have to be complete the first time, and the agent is built to flag a missing document before the case reaches your queue. And a sellable unit lost or damaged before a customer order is reimbursed at your sourcing cost, which excludes shipping, handling and customs duties, or at Amazon's own estimate if you have not provided one. Unsellable units get a reduced estimated cost, and no single unit is reimbursed more than $5,000. Keeping sourcing costs current from your purchase orders is part of recovery, not a separate finance chore.

The screen below is from the reimbursement management system we built for Execuseller: FBA units listed claim by claim with date, FNSKU, price, reason, disposition, country and quantity, each marked reimbursable or found. It is the same shape of list the agent builds for your queue. It is one account's screen, not a total across clients, and the amounts on it are not a typical result.

Why does your team still submit the claims?

Because a claim is a statement your account makes to Amazon, and Amazon treats careless ones as a problem. Its reimbursement policy says that submitting insufficiently researched or premature requests, or a large number of requests in a short time, interferes with its ability to help other sellers, and that sellers who do this repeatedly may see delayed support on their cases, monitoring, investigation and account action (checked September 25, 2026). A queue that a person reviews and submits at a steady pace is the simplest protection against that, and it keeps someone on your team accountable for every document sent.

The submission also happens inside Seller Central's own tools: the Inventory Defect and Reimbursement portal, the lost-item and damaged-item tools, the shipment's Contents tab and Get help. Amazon's Agent Policy says an agent must identify itself as one in every request it sends and must not hide that it is an agent, for example by mimicking the speed or pattern of human keystrokes and page navigation, or by completing CAPTCHAs (checked September 25, 2026). We keep the agent on the APIs you authorize and leave the clicks in Seller Central to a person. The agent is designed to follow Amazon's Agent Policy.

In practice the split is simple. The agent finds the case, holds it until the window opens and assembles the packet: the IDs, quantities and dates, the invoice, the proof of delivery or the photos, and a drafted description. A person on your team checks the evidence, submits it and logs the case ID. From then on the agent tracks the case to paid, denied or reversed, and a denial comes back with Amazon's reason and a proposed next step: submit again with new evidence, or close it. The aim is a short, ready-to-file list rather than a research project.

How does it reconcile settlements and 3PL counts?

Settlement reconciliation answers a plain question: did the money Amazon says it paid reach your bank, and is every line in it right? Amazon's settlement report documentation says settlement reports are scheduled automatically by Amazon and cannot be requested, only retrieved, and that the current flat-file version puts every charge in the same three columns: amount type, amount description and amount (checked September 25, 2026). That makes the report easy to check line by line. Between settlements, Amazon's Finances API returns financial events without waiting for a statement period to close, and one documented use of its newer version is working out which transactions make up a payment (checked September 25, 2026).

Settlement check: sum of all rows = the report's total amount = the deposit your bank received

On each settlement the agent runs that check, then goes line by line: fulfillment fees against the fee preview, refund rows against the refund administration fee rule, reimbursement lines against the Reimbursements report, and anything it cannot place. A settlement that ties out is closed without anyone opening it. One that does not, for example because of a reserve, a balance charged to your card or a missing deposit, comes back with the rows that break it and a plain-English note on the likely cause.

The finance screen at the top of this page, from one account running Growth OS, shows settlements waiting to be matched beside the orders that lose money after fees and COGS. Posting settlements into your accounting system, such as QuickBooks or NetSuite, is a separate integration job, so this agent stops at a reconciled, explained payout.

The 3PL side has two halves. The count half, matching what your 3PL shipped against what Amazon received and holds, is covered step by step on our 3PL and FBA reconciliation page. The agent runs that match daily, turns inbound shortages into rows in the claim table above, and passes reconciled stock to the inventory and replenishment agent. The billing half is where the finance agent adds something: it reads your 3PL's invoices, which often arrive as PDFs, and checks storage, receiving, pick-and-pack and outbound lines against the units actually received, stored and shipped that month. Lines that bill for activity that did not happen go to your warehouse contact, not to Amazon.

Where does profit reporting fit in?

Recovered reimbursements, corrected fees and reconciled settlements are the inputs a true profit number needs, so the agent writes its results to the same ledger your P&L reads. How we build that P&L per order, SKU and marketplace is on our Amazon profit analytics software page, and the margin it reports is defined under contribution margin. We have built that side before: a real-time profit and loss statement by marketplace for Beezboard, and P&L, landed-cost and inventory analytics on AWS for Zonkeepers, an accounting firm.

An owned agent or a percentage-of-recovery service?

Most reimbursement services charge a share of what they recover, and that is a fair model when you want the whole job done for you. It also means the cost rises with every dollar Amazon pays back: at 20%, each $10,000 recovered costs $2,000, and at 25% it costs $2,500. An owned agent is a different model. It is scoped in an architecture doc with a fixed price and go-live date, it runs on your accounts, and the case history and cost data it builds sit in your systems. Here is how the options compare, each described from its own pages, checked September 25, 2026.

We are one of the options in this table, so weigh our view accordingly. If you are looking for FBA reimbursement software without a percentage fee, there are four kinds here: Amazon's own process, subscription tools such as Refund Genie and Jarvio, Refunzo's free do-it-yourself option, and an owned agent. Apart from what Amazon pays automatically, all of them leave the submission to someone on your side, and they differ in which cases from the table above they check: Refund Genie, for example, says its reports leave out inbound shipment discrepancies.

If your recoverable gaps are small, which is more likely now that Amazon pays most warehouse and return cases on its own, a free or subscription tool is the better choice. A done-for-you service is the better choice if nobody on your team has an hour a week to submit claims. An owned agent earns its cost when recovery is one part of a larger finance job: fee audits across a big catalog, a check on every payout, 3PL invoices, and data you want to keep in your own system.

What does it take to deploy it on your accounts?

Five steps, most of them with your finance or operations lead in the room:

1. Diagnose. Start with the free 24-hour diagnostic: connect Amazon with Login with Amazon, no password shared, and get a report within 24 hours of connecting, on business days. It covers reimbursements owed alongside your other operations gaps. We only read data; we never change listings, prices, stock or ads.
2. Scope and date. The agent is scoped in an architecture doc with a fixed price and go-live date: which case types it covers, which 3PLs and bank accounts it reconciles, and who on your team submits.
3. Connect. You authorize the agent through Amazon's SP-API with the roles these reports need, Amazon Fulfillment for the FBA reports and Finance and Accounting for settlements and the Finances API, and connect your 3PL's data and your purchase-order records.
4. Load costs and documents. Sourcing cost per SKU from your purchase orders, supplier invoices, and the place your carrier proofs of delivery and removal photos are kept.
5. Set the rules. Your finance lead sets the variance thresholds for settlements and 3PL invoices and the order in which the queue is worked.

The agent runs on your seller and warehouse accounts, not ours. It works through the APIs you authorize, prepares claims and disputes, and leaves every submission to a person on your team. You keep your accounts, your data and the custom code we build; the Growth OS base is licensed to you. If you stop working with us, your accounts, data and custom code stay with you, and the Growth OS base continues under its license terms. We never buy your inventory or sell under our own accounts.

We have built this plumbing before. The reimbursement management system we built for Execuseller covers lost and damaged warehouse units, units disposed without authorization, lost inbound and outbound units, FBA fee overcharges, damaged returns, wrong FNSKU labels and order discrepancies, and it lists the events that are not eligible next to the ones that are. It works from the Reimbursements, Inventory Ledger detail, removal shipment detail, customer returns, replacements and fee preview reports, plus Amazon's finance and shipment APIs. The hard part was matching, because some events have no direct link between reports.

Seller7, a multi-marketplace seller OS we built, includes reimbursement recovery and a live P&L on every order, and pulls each marketplace's data through that marketplace's own API. We describe both as software we built, not as agents. They are the reason the claim table above names the reports it does: we have written matching logic against most of them before, including the cases where two reports share no direct key.

Ecomsellertool builds and deploys this finance and recovery agent on your own accounts. We start from the reimbursements module in Growth OS, connect your Amazon, 3PL and cost data, and add the settlement and 3PL checks your finance team needs, so they review a short queue instead of rebuilding spreadsheets. We have built on Amazon's seller APIs since 2017. Start with the free 24-hour diagnostic or schedule a call.