Reading a marketplace settlement file without losing the fee story
Which columns matter first when you open a settlement export, and which ones distract from commission tracking.
Settlement portals love wide exports. Forty columns feel thorough; most of them do not answer whether commission matched the schedule you thought you were on.
Start with three anchors: order identifier, gross merchandise value for the line, and commission or fee amount. Everything else—shipping subsidies, coin redemptions, advertising debits—belongs in a second pass once those three line up.
When commission is missing as a dedicated column and only appears inside a net payout, rebuild it from GMV minus other known deductions rather than guessing. If the rebuild still refuses to match the fee table, stop and check category codes before blaming “system error.” Category moves mid-month explain more variance than finance teams expect.
Keep a dated copy of the fee schedule that applied at the start of the window. Portal pages update quietly; your PDF from week one is often the only way to prove what you believed the rate to be.