I had to take a class in accounting before I understood the difference between sales and earnings. Fortunately, learning about Amazon Mobile App Distribution Program sales and earnings reporting is quite a bit simpler than that accounting class. 

While there are 7 possible reports to choose from, in this blog post, we’ll cover three popular financial reports:

• Sales reports – show basic sales less returns over customizable time periods and countries.
• Earnings reports – show more details (including adjustments) in a fixed one-month period.
• Payment Reports – show you what you are actually paid every month.

Sales Reports show trends in sales and returns over standard or custom time periods. You can get daily breakdowns in CSV reports, and you can see sales broken out by individual marketplace or by the almost 200 countries in which you app could be sold. Data in sales reports are updated every few hours but do not reflect processed financial data for the current month. They do not include adjustments and other data that will affect your payment.

Below are two examples of reporting that can be customized by app and international marketplace. The first is a map view. Note the drop-down buttons for ‘Date’, ‘All Apps’ and ‘All Marketplaces’. These let you show a specific date range and show sales by marketplace (like amazon.co.uk or amazon.fr) or by the country (such as Brasil or Norway).

The next example shows a tabular view of the Sales report with detail such as Units Sold, Units Returned, Units Refunded and Gross Revenue.

Earnings Reports represent the sales, refunds, app earnings and adjustment data used to calculate royalties earned during a given month. Data in earnings reports are released on a monthly basis once royalties earned in the previous month have been processed and approved. Monthly summary information is available in the Amazon Mobile App Distribution Portal and daily breakdowns are available through CSV export.

Payment Reports represent the actual disbursement of funds from Amazon. Monthly summary information is available in the Amazon Mobile App Distribution Portal on the payment reports section.

Accessing Reports Getting these reports is easy. Log in to the Amazon Portal and click on the Reporting link (shown below). Then select the report you want, then select your customization filters below that.

(Note: of the seven reports shown in the screen shot below, all but the Beta Engagement report now allow reporting by country of sale)

The Amazon Moblie App Distribution Program gives you useful reporting data that is pretty easy to access and understand. My accounting teacher would be proud. Try getting a few reports now, and see how easy it is to get data on your apps today.