BeanHawk vs Link My Books
Link My Books posts summarized marketplace settlements to QuickBooks and Xero with a guided setup, positioned as an approachable A2X alternative.
BeanHawk is accounting software for Amazon and multichannel sellers that also recovers the money Amazon owes you: settlement journals, inventory economics, and FBA reimbursement recovery in one flat-priced plan.
| Capability | BeanHawk | Link My Books |
|---|---|---|
| FBA reimbursement recovery | ✓Core wedge, continuous FBA discrepancy detection and claim filing. | ✗No FBA reimbursement recovery. |
| Settlement → QuickBooks & Xero journals | ✓One summarized journal per settlement, reconciled to the penny. | ✓Settlement accounting to QBO/Xero with guided onboarding. |
| Per-SKU COGS & inventory valuation | ✓Perpetual SKU valuation and COGS from real landed cost. | ~Basic COGS; not full perpetual inventory valuation. |
| Landed cost & purchase orders | ✓Landed-cost POs feed COGS and reimbursement valuation. | ✗No landed-cost PO workflow. |
| Multichannel (Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Walmart, Etsy) | ✓Every channel supported. | ✓Major channels; tiered by order volume. |
| Flat pricing, every channel included | ✓One flat price, no per-channel fees. | ✗Tiered by monthly order count. |
| Free fee calculators & reimbursement audit | ✓Free FBA/eBay/Shopify calculators and a free reimbursement audit. | ~Some free tools; no reimbursement audit. |
| Pricing | Flat, all channels included, from $19/mo. | Mid-priced; tiers scale with monthly order count. Verify current pricing. |
Comparison reflects each product's positioning as of 2026; competitor features and pricing change, so verify current details on their site.
Choose Link My Books if
Sellers who want friendly, well-guided settlement bookkeeping for QuickBooks or Xero.
Choose BeanHawk if
BeanHawk gives you the same clean settlement journals plus reimbursement recovery and real inventory economics, without per-order pricing tiers.
What Link My Books genuinely does well
The product is built so a non-accountant can reach a correct first journal without hiring a consultant. Setup walks you through tax rates, account mapping and channel connection, explaining in plain language what each choice does to your books, and it flags the mappings people usually get wrong. For a seller doing their own bookkeeping, that is the difference between finishing setup and abandoning it.
Tax handling reflects the product's UK roots and is careful about the cases that quietly ruin books: marketplace-facilitator tax that was already collected and remitted, VAT treatment, and cross-border sales. Getting that wrong overstates both revenue and liability, and it is the most common mess in ecommerce ledgers.
Support has a good reputation and there is an accountant-facing side to the business, so if you work with a bookkeeper there is a fair chance they have seen it before. The journals themselves are clean summarized entries that reconcile to the payout, the same fundamental shape any good settlement tool produces.
The pricing model: order count, not channels
Pricing is tiered by monthly order count rather than charged per connected channel. Verify current tiers on their site since they move, but the model is the part that matters when you are forecasting: as orders grow, you step up, and the channel count is not the primary lever.
That is friendlier than per-channel pricing for a multichannel seller at modest volume, and it is one of the honest advantages of the product over the premium end of the market. Sellers who list on three marketplaces without huge order counts often come out well here.
The tension arrives at scale. Posting one summarized journal for 40,000 orders is not more accounting work than posting one for 4,000, so a bill that tracks order count is charging you for a metric only loosely related to the work being done. If order volume is your deciding factor, run your actual monthly count against both tools' current published tiers rather than trusting anyone's summary, this page included.
Where the scope ends
There is no FBA reimbursement recovery. Lost units, damaged units, fee over-charges and refunds where the goods never returned to sellable stock get booked as whatever Amazon reported them to be. Recovering that money stays a separate job with a separate vendor, a separate cut of the proceeds, or a person on your team working case logs.
COGS exists in a basic form, but it is not perpetual inventory valuation and there is no purchase-order and landed-cost workflow. Supplier cost, freight and duty live outside the product. If your balance-sheet inventory number currently comes from a spreadsheet, that spreadsheet is still your source of truth after you buy this, and it is still the thing your accountant has to accept on faith.
That is a deliberate scope choice, not an oversight. A tool that does settlement accounting well and refuses to sprawl is easier to trust than one that half-does five jobs. It only costs you if you were hoping to retire the spreadsheet.
How the month-end differs in practice
With Link My Books, close means reviewing the settlement summary, checking the tax rates behaved, and approving the journal. It is quick, and the guided design means you usually know why each number is where it is. Inventory and recovery happen elsewhere, on your own schedule, in your own tools.
With BeanHawk, the same settlement produces the same kind of summarized journal, and the same feed also drives discrepancy detection and perpetual SKU valuation. Reimbursement cases are found and filed continuously, valued at the landed cost your own purchase orders established, and the recovery lands back in the books as a real entry rather than a mystery deposit.
Both approaches are defensible. One optimizes for a small, well-explained tool you fully understand; the other optimizes for one source of truth across recovery, valuation and the ledger. The right answer depends on how much of your operation currently lives in spreadsheets and whether that bothers you.
Who should honestly pick Link My Books
Pick it if you are doing your own books, you want guardrails during setup, and tax correctness is the part that worries you most. The onboarding experience is a genuine feature and it is the reason many sellers who bounced off other tools stayed with this one.
Pick it if you are multichannel at low to moderate order volume and per-channel pricing elsewhere is the thing pushing your bill up. On that specific shape of business, order-count tiers can work out cheaper.
BeanHawk makes more sense when order volume has grown enough that count-based tiers sting, when nobody is chasing FBA discrepancies, or when you want inventory valuation and landed cost inside the same system that posts your journals. If neither of those is true for you, the friendlier tool is a reasonable choice and we would rather say so.
What moving from Link My Books to BeanHawk involves
- 1
Export the tax-rate and account mapping first
Capture how each settlement component maps to your QuickBooks or Xero accounts, and record the tax rates chosen for each channel and region. Tax mapping is the part with real consequences and the part most worth recreating exactly rather than rebuilding from memory.
- 2
Cut over at a period boundary
Move on the first day of a month or quarter so no period ends up with journals from two systems. Mid-month cutovers create a reconciliation that costs more time than waiting a few weeks ever would.
- 3
Nothing historical needs to move
Journals already posted live in your ledger and stay there untouched. BeanHawk picks up from your cutover settlement forward, so prior periods keep the exact numbers your accountant already reviewed and there is no risk of duplicate entries.
- 4
Parallel-run one settlement and compare tax lines
Process the same settlement in both tools and compare line by line before posting, paying particular attention to marketplace-facilitator tax and any VAT treatment. Totals must reconcile to the deposit to the penny. Differences here are mapping decisions, not errors, and settling them once at the start prevents a year of small discrepancies.
- 5
Plan the inventory opening balance
Landed cost and perpetual valuation do not transfer, because they were not there to transfer. You enter opening quantities and unit costs once, then purchase orders carry freight and duty into unit cost going forward. Run the free reimbursement audit in the same week, since Amazon's own claim windows keep closing whether or not anyone is filing.
The honest verdict
Link My Books is a well-made settlement accounting tool with the friendliest setup in the category, and if your worry is getting tax treatment right without hiring help, it earns its place. Its limits are honest ones: no reimbursement recovery, no landed cost, no perpetual inventory, and a bill that climbs with order count rather than with the amount of accounting work being done. BeanHawk is the better fit when volume has grown past the point where order-count tiers make sense, or when you want recovery and inventory valuation in the same system that posts your journals. Compare both against your real monthly order count and current published pricing, and if you are a small multichannel seller who mostly needs clean journals, the simpler tool may genuinely be the right call.
See what Amazon owes you — free
Connect your seller account and get a free reimbursement audit. No credit card, keep 100% of what you recover.
More comparisons: BeanHawk vs A2X · BeanHawk vs Sellerboard · BeanHawk vs Taxomate