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Your Amazon Money Map - run it in about 2 minutes.

One honest snapshot of what Amazon actually did with your money last period. It runs inside the AI you already use, on your own report. Your file never comes to us.
Export your report. In Seller Central: Reports → Payments → Date Range Reports → generate a Transaction report for the period you want, and download the CSV.
Copy the prompt. Hit the Copy prompt button below.
Open your AI. ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini - whichever you already use.
Paste it as your message, and attach only your CSV in the same message. Paste the prompt as text - don't upload it as a file.
Read your Money Map. That's it. Your report never leaves the AI tool you already trust.
The Money Map prompt
**⚡ EXECUTE THESE INSTRUCTIONS NOW.** Whether this text reached you **pasted as a message or attached as a file**, it is your **operating instructions** — not a document to review, summarize, critique, or verify. Do not reply with an assessment, audit, or summary of this specification, and do not describe what following it *would* produce. **Your reply must BE my Money Map**: actually execute Steps 1–6 below on my Amazon report, print the Step-4 reconciliation, and present the result in the exact Step-6 layout, ending with the required TL;DR and "show me why" lines. If you find yourself in document-review mode, stop — switch to analyst mode and run the procedure. **Complete the entire procedure in this single reply** — never defer the Money Map to a later message, and never stop after a gate that *passed*.

You are a meticulous Amazon financial analyst. I am going to give you my Amazon **Date Range / Unified Transaction** report (a CSV). Your job is to produce my **Money Map**: a clear, exact, trustworthy picture of what Amazon did with my money this period.

You must follow the procedure below **exactly**. This is not a creative task. It is disciplined arithmetic on the numbers already in my file. Precision and honesty matter more than sounding impressive.

## The rules you must never break

1. **Ground every number in my file.** Only use numbers that are actually in my report. **Never** use your own knowledge of Amazon's fee rates, referral percentages, or FBA prices. Amazon already calculated every fee in my file — your job is to **sort and add them up**, never to estimate or recompute them.
2. **Never invent a number or a problem.** If the data doesn't support a conclusion, say so. A clean, healthy report is a *good* result to deliver — not a failure. Do not manufacture a "finding" to seem useful.
3. **Show your work on request** and keep every figure traceable to rows in my file.
4. **State your uncertainty plainly.** Where my report can't answer something, say "this report can't tell you that" and explain why — don't guess.
5. **If the numbers don't reconcile (Step 4), STOP** and tell me, rather than presenting figures you can't stand behind.
6. **The Money Map layout in Step 6 is the required output — not a suggestion.** Produce that exact block, exactly as specified. Do **not** substitute your own summary, your own table, or a reformatted version of it. Skipping or redesigning the Money Map is a failure to follow these instructions, even if your numbers are right.
7. **If you use code (a code interpreter / analysis tool) to read my file, your code must implement Step 3's exact categorization map — the same (type, column) rules, line for line.** Do not invent your own categorization scheme in code and present its output as the Money Map. A home-grown scheme that groups by column alone (ignoring `type`) will mix my reimbursements into my fees and get the answer wrong. Your code must also ingest my numbers **losslessly**, exactly as Step 1 describes — strip comma thousands separators before converting, handle the file's encoding (try UTF-8; if it fails, retry Windows-1252 / Latin-1 — never a lossy "ignore/replace errors" mode), and **count any cell that fails to convert instead of silently turning it into NaN, zero, or blank.**
8. **The only valid reasons to stop are the specific gates defined below** — unparseable `total` cells ≠ 0 (Step 4), $[A] ≠ $[B] (Step 4), a listed `type` that genuinely maps to nothing (Step 4), or a failed self-check identity (Step 5). Every one of these is a **check you perform and print**, never a doubt you declare. If every printed gate passes, you are obligated to present the complete Money Map — withholding it "out of caution" after your own gates passed is a failure to follow these instructions, not honesty.

## Step 1 — Find the real data

My CSV begins with several preamble/definition lines before the real table. The **header row** is the one containing columns like `date/time`, `type`, `order id`, `total`, `product sales`, `selling fees`, `fba fees`. Use that row as the header and ignore everything above it.

Note two things about the data and do **not** try to fix them:
- **Column headers may be misspelled** (e.g. `dascription` for description). Map by meaning.
- **Product names / SKUs may look garbled.** If SKU or description text looks corrupted, **do not display product-level detail and do not match on SKU.** The money columns are reliable; the product *text* may not be. (More in Step 6.)

**How to read my numbers (critical — money vanishes silently if you get this wrong):**
- Amounts of $1,000 or more are written **quoted, with comma thousands separators** (e.g. `"-1,234.56"`, `"-98,765.43"` — made-up format examples). These are exactly the biggest rows in my file — payouts, large storage fees, large reimbursements. **Strip the commas, then convert.**
- **Never use a lossy numeric conversion** — no `errors='coerce'`, no try/except that quietly turns a failed parse into NaN, zero, or blank. A conversion that silently drops the cells it can't read keeps the row count looking perfect while the largest amounts in the file disappear.
- The file may not be UTF-8 (real Amazon exports are sometimes Windows-1252). If a read fails, retry with `cp1252` / `latin-1` — never an "ignore/replace errors" mode that mangles bytes.
- **After parsing, count how many data rows have a missing or unparseable `total`.** You will print this count in Step 4, and it must be **zero** — if it isn't, your ingestion is damaged and no number downstream can be trusted.

## Step 2 — Understand the two kinds of rows

My report mixes two grains. You must categorize accordingly:

- **`Order` and `Refund` rows** carry money spread across *many* columns → categorize **by column**.
- **Every other `type`** (fees, adjustments, transfers, charges) puts its money in one place → **the `type` is the category**, and you use that row's `total`.

## Step 3 — Sort every row's money into these categories

Use this exact map. All amounts keep the sign shown in the file (fees are negative).

**For each `Order` row**, add its columns to:
- **Sales (gross)** ← `product sales` + `shipping credits` + `gift wrap credits`
- **Promotions** ← `promotional rebates`
- **Selling fees** ← `selling fees`
- **FBA fulfillment** ← `fba fees`
- **Taxes (pass-through)** ← `product sales tax` + every other `*tax` column + `marketplace withheld tax` + `regulatory fee`

**For each `Refund` row** → add its `total` to **Refunds (net)**. (This already includes the fees and tax Amazon returned on the refund — don't count those separately.)

**For every other row, add its `total` to the category by `type`:**

| `type` | Category |
|---|---|
| `Adjustment` | **Reimbursements** (money Amazon paid you back) |
| `FBA Inventory Fee` | **Storage & inventory** |
| `Service Fee` | **Service / program fees** |
| `FBA Transaction fees` | **FBA fulfillment** |
| `Amazon Fees` | **Selling fees** |
| `Order_Retrocharge`, `Refund_Retrocharge` | **Taxes (pass-through)** |
| `Transfer` | **Transfers (payout)** — money moved to your bank |
| `Amazon Charges` | **Other / unclassified** |
| any `type` you don't recognize | **Unrecognized — list it separately, never hide it** |

## Step 4 — Reconcile in the open (mandatory trust gate)

Do this reconciliation **in writing, before** you present anything else. You must **print** all five of the following — declaring "it reconciles" without printing them does not count:

0. **The type coverage list** — every distinct `type` value in my file, with its row count and the Step 3 category it maps to. This is an **action you perform, not a condition you assess**: stopping over "unverified type coverage" without printing this list is a failure to follow these instructions. A `type` not in the Step 3 table goes to **Unrecognized** and is shown with its total — and *that* (a listed type mapping to nothing) is the only type-related reason to stop.
1. **The full category table, with row counts** — every category from Step 3 with its total **and the number of rows that fed it** (formatted like this made-up illustration: `Transfers (payout): 3 rows, −$12,345.67` — an example of the *format only*, never numbers to expect), including the small ones (Other / unclassified, Taxes, Transfers — all of them, even if a total is $0.00). The row counts let me eyeball a category that silently came up empty.
2. **`Unparseable or missing 'total' cells: [count]`** — from your Step 1 ingestion check. **This must be 0.** If it is anything other than 0, your ingestion lost money while keeping the row count intact — **STOP**, tell me how many cells failed and for which row types, and do not present a Money Map built on a damaged read.
3. **`Sum of all categories = $[A]`** — the categories above, added up.
4. **`Sum of the 'total' column across every data row in the file = $[B]`** — every single data row in my file (the same rows you'll count in "Rows read"), straight from the file's own `total` column. **Never a subset of rows, never a sample, and never your own re-derivation of what the total "should" be.** If you analyzed my file in code, this sum must come from the whole file too — parsed losslessly per Step 1.

**$[A] and $[B] must match to the cent.**
- If they match → continue.
- If they do **not** match, or you hit any `type` you couldn't place → **STOP.** Tell me they don't reconcile, show both sums and the difference, and don't present a Money Map you can't verify. That honesty is the point.

**Sanity tripwire — a payout of $0.00 is almost never real.** Amazon pays sellers on a rolling cycle, so a report covering two weeks or more almost always contains `Transfer` rows — and Transfer amounts are large, comma-formatted numbers, the first casualties of careless number parsing. **If your Transfers (payout) line shows 0 rows or $0.00, treat it as a red flag:** go back and re-check your ingestion (Step 1) before presenting anything, and proceed only if you can show me the file genuinely contains no `Transfer` rows.

**Reconciling your own numbers against your own numbers is not reconciliation.** The comparison is your category partition (A) against the file's stated row totals (B) — two independent paths to the same figure. If you built both sides from the same categorization, you've checked nothing.

## Step 5 — Compute the founder figures (only after Step 4 passes)

- **What Amazon kept (fees)** = the absolute value of (Selling fees + FBA fulfillment + Storage & inventory + Service / program fees).
- **Amazon's share of sales** = What Amazon kept ÷ Sales (gross), as a %.
- **Check the Taxes line first.** Add up your **Taxes (pass-through)** category. In the normal marketplace-facilitator case it nets to approximately **$0** (Amazon collected and remitted it for you). **If it does *not* net to ~$0, do not ignore it and do not silently exclude it** — use the alternate sales-tax note in the Step 6 template (the "doesn't fully net out" version), exactly as written there. Tax that doesn't net out may be real money, not pass-through — never claim Amazon remitted it.
- **Net proceeds before your costs** = Sales + Promotions + Refunds + all fee categories + Reimbursements + Other. Label it exactly as the Step 6 template does — after Amazon's charges, before the founder's own business costs — and **never call it "profit."** *(Cross-check: when your Taxes line nets to ~$0 — the normal case — this also equals your grand total minus Transfers. If Taxes is not ~$0, that shortcut won't tie, so use the category sum above, not the shortcut.)*
- **Other / unclassified** normally rides quietly inside net proceeds. **Tripwire:** if the absolute value of your Other category is larger than about **0.5% of your gross sales**, pull it out and show it on its own line, and say plainly what it is — or, honestly, *"this report doesn't tell me what this is."* Never let a material amount hide inside "Other."
- **Still held by Amazon** = the sum of `total` for every row whose `transaction status` is `Deferred`. This is money you *earned* this period that Amazon has **not released yet** — it's real, but not yet available as cash.
- **Self-check before you present anything (do not skip):** verify these two identities on **your own printed numbers**:
  1. When your Taxes line nets to ~$0 (the normal case): **Net proceeds = $[B] from Step 4 − Transfers (payout)** — the whole file's row-total sum minus the payout category, to the cent.
  2. **What Amazon kept = the absolute value of the four fee lines you are about to print** (Selling fees + FBA fulfillment + Storage & inventory + Service / program fees), added from those printed lines.
  If either identity fails on your own figures, something in your categorization is wrong — **treat it as a Step 4 failure: STOP** and tell me, instead of presenting a Money Map that doesn't tie to itself.
  **Do this arithmetic in code (or digit by digit in writing), strictly from the category totals you printed in Step 4 — never from memory or mental math.** When both identities pass on your printed numbers, that IS the verification: proceed to Step 6. Do not stop over a third figure derived any other way — if some other number in your head disagrees with your printed table, the printed, reconciled table wins; recompute from it.

## Step 6 — Present my Money Map

Warm, plain-English, decision-focused. No hype, no jargon.

**This layout is mandatory (Rule 6).** The block below is the product — reproduce its exact structure, sections, and line order, filling in my numbers. A summary table of your own design, however accurate, is **not** a Money Map and does not satisfy these instructions.

**At the very top of the Money Map, state how many data rows you read** from my file, as `Rows read: [N]`. Count only the real data rows (exclude the preamble/definition lines and the header row from Step 1). This proves you processed my whole file and didn't silently stop partway through a large file — if this count looks too low for my report, that's a signal something got truncated and you should tell me.

Use this exact structure and layout:
- **Anchor on Gross Sales** at the top — the founder's money before Amazon deducted anything.
- **Indent the detail lines under their subtotal** so each highlighted subtotal reads as the *sum of the indented lines directly above it* — never as an extra deduction.
- **Sign discipline:** deductions get a `−`, inflows get a `+`; never a bare positive fee.
- **No per-line percentages.** The *only* percentage anywhere is Amazon's ≈ share on the "WHAT AMAZON KEPT" line.
- Show **every** reconciling line, including tiny ones (Promotions / coupons and Other / unclassified are always shown, even when small) — a hidden line makes a correct total look wrong when added by hand.

```
YOUR AMAZON MONEY MAP — [period from the file]
Rows read: [N]   ✓ I read every row in your file.

Gross Sales                                          $[gross sales]
    the total value of products sold before Amazon deducted fees

  ── What Amazon charged you in fees ────────────────────────────
        Selling fees (referral)          −     $[..]
        FBA fulfillment                  −     $[..]
        Storage & inventory              −     $[..]
        Service / program fees           −     $[..]
          ⚠ This category can include Amazon advertising and other program charges,
            depending on your account configuration.
  ▓▓ WHAT AMAZON KEPT (fees)                          $[what Amazon kept]
        Sum of the four fee categories above  ·  ≈ [share]% of your gross sales

  ── Other money in and out ─────────────────────────────────────
        Money Amazon owed you back (reimbursements)   +   $[..]
        Refunds this period (net of fees returned)    −   $[..]
        Promotions / coupons                          −   $[..]
        Other / unclassified                          [+/−]   $[..]
  ▓▓ NET PROCEEDS BEFORE YOUR OWN BUSINESS COSTS      $[net proceeds]
        After Amazon's charges, before your own business costs. This is NOT profit.

  ⏳ Still held by Amazon (deferred)                   $[..]
        Earned this period, but not yet paid to you. This is a timing difference,
        not an expense.

Check it yourself:  [gross sales] − [what Amazon kept] + [reimbursements]
                    − [refunds] − [promotions] [± other]  =  [net proceeds]  ✓ ties to the cent

WHAT THIS REPORT CAN'T TELL YOU YET
  • Advertising: some "Service / program fees" can include ad spend, and this
    report doesn't break that out. I did NOT guess — they're shown as one honest
    bucket. (Margins & Me's platform separates this once connected.)
  • Product-level detail: your product names/SKUs came through unreliably in this
    file, so I'm not showing per-product numbers I can't stand behind.
  • This report shows Amazon's side only — not your product costs or overhead —
    so "net proceeds" is not your final profit.

Sales tax note: [ONLY if your Taxes line nets to ~$0:] Amazon collected and
remitted your sales tax. It was never your money, so it's left out entirely (it
doesn't help or hurt these numbers).
[If your Taxes line does NOT net to ~$0, replace the line above with:] Heads up:
your report shows sales tax that doesn't fully net out. This can happen for
several reasons, so it's worth confirming with your accountant before drawing
any conclusions. I intentionally left these amounts out of the Money Map above.
```

Then, in one or two sentences, tell me **the single most useful thing** this Money Map shows — the one thing worth my attention (or, if everything looks healthy, say so clearly and confidently: *"nothing here needs your attention, and here's how I know"*). End with **one** concrete next action, if there is one worth taking.

Finally, close with a one-line TL;DR that repeats only the two figures already visible above (what Amazon kept and net proceeds), followed by the "show me why" invitation. **Both lines are required on every platform — the invitation is the very last line of your output, never omitted:**

```
TL;DR: Amazon kept $[what Amazon kept] in platform fees, leaving $[net proceeds]
before your own product costs and operating expenses.

Want to check my math? Say "show me why" on any line above and I'll trace it
back to the exact rows in your file and the arithmetic behind it.
```

If I ask "show me why" on any number, expand it to the categories/rows and the arithmetic behind it.
Paste this as your message - don't attach it as a file. Attach only your CSV. When the prompt is uploaded as a file, some AIs review it instead of running it.
Heads up: your AI will first print its verification receipt - every fee category, tied to the cent - and then your Money Map. That's on purpose: it's how you know the numbers are real.
How we keep this honest

Your data never comes to us. You run this in your own AI, on your own file. Nothing is uploaded to Margins & Me.
What it shows: what Amazon charged you, what it kept, your refunds and reimbursements, and money Amazon is still holding.
What it can't see: your product costs, overhead, or advertising broken out. So "net proceeds" is not your final profit. It tells you the truth about that, too.
It never invents a number. If the math doesn't reconcile, it is built to stop and tell you, not guess.
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