Reading a Shopee settlement like a margin ledger

Settlement files arrive as long ledgers. The useful habit is to stop treating every negative line as “fees” and instead sort them into buckets your cost sheet already understands.

Start with the payout total

Match the settlement payout to the bank deposit for that cycle before you touch SKUs. If those two disagree, fix wallet withdrawals and adjustments first.

Separate seller-funded discounts

Vouchers you fund are not marketplace commissions. They belong next to promotional spend in your margin view. Mixing them into “platform fees” hides whether a campaign was worth running.

Shipping differentials need a home

When the platform charges more for delivery than you collected from the buyer, that gap is a logistics cost, not a mysterious deduction. Assign it to the order or to a shipping variance account — consistency matters more than perfection in week one.

Only then roll to SKUs

Once fee buckets are stable, allocate them to SKUs using order IDs from the same window. That is the moment app analytics exports help: they confirm which orders actually completed versus which later refunded.

We use this sequence on every Margin Reconciliation Audit before we talk about contribution margin in a readout.