P&L Advanced view: fees, credits and tying out to eBay's Financial Summary

The Profit & Loss report has a Simple view and an Advanced view. Advanced view breaks every figure down into debits, credits and a net total, so you can line it up against eBay’s own Financial Summary and check the two agree. This article covers switching to Advanced, what it adds, and how to use it to tie out and drill into the transactions behind any number.

Switching to Advanced view

On Reports → Profit & Loss, look for the Simple / Advanced toggle near the top of the report. Simple view gives you one net figure per line, which is enough for a quick read of how the period went. Advanced view replaces that single figure with three columns: Debits, Credits and Net.

Note how the columns fill in. The eBay fee lines, Shipping Costs and the Net Transfers rows are the ones split into a separate Debit, Credit and Net; charges and any credits sit in their own columns rather than being netted into one number. Revenue, Cost of Goods, refund lines, subtotals and the margin percentages show a single figure in the Net column.

What Advanced view adds

Switching to Advanced changes more than the column layout. Two things only appear in Advanced view:

• eBay fee breakdown. Instead of one combined fees line, fees are split out by type (Transaction fees, Promoted Listings fees, Insertion fees and so on), each with its own Debit, Credit and Net, so you can see charges and any fee credits separately rather than as a single netted number.
• Net Transfers block. A separate block at the foot of the report showing Charges and Payouts to bank for the period, which sits alongside the P&L lines rather than inside them.

Tying out to eBay’s Financial Summary

eBay publishes its own Financial Summary (available as a PDF from eBay’s Seller Hub). Advanced view is built to reconcile against that document line by line rather than as a single lump total, which makes it much easier to spot exactly where a mismatch sits if one shows up.

1. Open Advanced view for the same date range as the eBay Financial Summary you are checking against.
2. Download or open eBay’s Financial Summary PDF for that same period from Seller Hub.
3. Work down the report matching each debit and credit line to its equivalent on eBay’s summary.
4. Compare the net figures for each matched line, then compare the overall totals.
5. Where a line does not match, use the drill-down (below) to see the transactions making it up before you go looking for the discrepancy elsewhere.

Matching line by line, rather than just checking the bottom-line total, is the reliable way to catch a discrepancy early, before it gets buried in a period’s worth of activity.

Drilling into a line

In Advanced view, click any line that has a value to open a drawer that slides in from the right, listing the underlying transactions that make up that figure. This is the fastest way to confirm a number is right, or to find the specific transaction behind a figure that does not match eBay’s Financial Summary.

The drawer keeps the report visible behind it, so you can check a line and close it without losing your place. Its header repeats the line you clicked, the period and the Debits and Credits totals; the table below lists each contributing transaction with its date, the item or entry it came from, and the amount in the Debit or Credit column. The foot of the drawer shows the transaction count.

Hiding empty rows

Advanced view can include a lot of lines once fees and credits are split out, and some of them may be zero for a given period. Use the Hide empty option in the report header to remove rows with no activity, so the report only shows the lines that actually moved money. This keeps a reconciliation focused on the figures that need checking rather than a long list of zeros.

See the related articles below for more on the Profit & Loss report and reconciling your eBay figures.