Connect to Amazon account to download orders assign categories to individual items, match up/split

Mac Chinsomboon

I order a lot of stuff via Amazon for my business. Would be nice to connect to my Amazon account to download orders, and assign categories to individual items, match up/split transaction with the credit card charge. I'm often ordering many things on different orders or the same order and would be great to assign categories for individual items, which then automatically split the payment in the Quicken transaction register. It should also be able to match up the corresponding return on that same item as well. It could even memorize the item so that same item when ordered again, would be automatically categorized. Thx.

(9 Legacy Votes)

barblroth

Is quicken going to respond to this question? It is super important for many of us big amazon for business users.

Quicken_Tyka

Hello Barblroth,

This post is an Idea post meaning that this feature is currently unavailable.

Idea posts allow users to vote on what they would like to see in the product. Developers will review idea posts to get an Idea of what people would like to see.

Unfortunately, this post doesn't have any votes. If this were to be implemented or planned to be we wouldn't have any real ETA to offer on when and if you could expect to see this.

I apologize for not having better news.

EdgyCricket

barblroth said:

Is quicken going to respond to this question? It is super important for many of us big amazon for business users.

If you're interested in it you need to upvote it.

stevedz

Quicken should figure out how to download categories from Amazon. I buy almost everything for my home on Amazon and have to categorize everything manually. It seems like a simple thing to do. Quicken does it with my credit cards.

NotACPA

Unfortunately,  Amazon  is NOT a Financial Institution. So, I strongly suspect, that they'll never qualify  for this. 

They're  a merchant.

And even my Kroger Credit  Card (issued by US Bank) doesn't  download  the  detail  info into Q.  The amount and date  posted download ...  but not the  detail that you're  seeking.

@stevedz, what  card downloads the  DETAILS  of your purchases?  And, do  you have it  set up as a Memorized Payee in your copy of  Quicken?

JasonPerrone

Today, when you download information with Quicken, you essentially get one text field that is Payee/Payer and an amount.

I would love more information to come along with the transaction, specifically item details or invoice information.

Here's an example. Let's say I download a transaction from Amazon.com. It would be wonderful if next to that transaction in my ledger there was a note icon I can click on and see what items were in the order.

The problem I am trying to solve is, I place many orders with Amazon. All I see are dollar amounts. I then have to go to Amazon, look up my orders and decide which orders were personal care items, which orders were gifts, which were business expenses.

It would really help categorizing transactions if additional data like order information came down with the transaction.

wdolbec

In the downloaded Memo field I get an 11 digit number with "Merchandise" on the end. Can this number be used to track down the actual purchase? So far, I haven't found these numbers on the Amazon site.

Dylan N

This is a massive problem for me. Does anyone else find that the dollar amounts downloaded on Quicken don't always match up with your Amazon invoices? I spend hours trying to match orders with my Quicken numbers - there has to be a way for Quicken to better pair up with Amazon. Most of the time I give up on half my Amazon orders and just categorize 'shopping'. Very frustrating...

thecreator

Hi @""Mac Chinsomboon" ,

Your Idea is never going to happen. Sychrony Bank which hosts the Amazon Store Card, is not Quicken Friendly.

thecreator

Dylan N said:

This is a massive problem for me. Does anyone else find that the dollar amounts downloaded on Quicken don't always match up with your Amazon invoices? I spend hours trying to match orders with my Quicken numbers - there has to be a way for Quicken to better pair up with Amazon. Most of the time I give up on half my Amazon orders and just categorize 'shopping'. Very frustrating...

Hi @""Dylan N" ,

When dealing with Amazon, you order a lot of items, but they don't ship everything at the same time. They bill the items, when the item is shipped. To Categorize correctly, you need to manually enter the transaction, then match to existing transaction to clear the transaction.

geosuchand

Quicken needs to fix this. They need to work with Amazon and come up with a solution.

hinder90

Amazon actually lets you download full CSV reports of your orders going back YEARS. You can view by orders/shipments or by items which even includes a category. Even though neither has the unique merchant code Amazon uses for each transaction on these reports, Quicken has all of the information that it needs to not only match the transactions but CREATE SPLITS AND CREATE AUTOMATIC CATEGORIZATION RULES, including sales tax, subscribe-and-save-discounts, and store credit. There is absolutely no excuse for Quicken to not supporting at least manually importing reports. Finding these huge feature gaps where 95% of the work is already done makes me crazy.

NotACPA

As I stated previously, It's not going to happen ... because Amazon is NOT a Financial Institution and only Financial Institutions download into Q.

BUT, if you want to lobby for this ... go bug Amazon to get them to sign the contract with Quicken/Intuit to make this happen.

Q can do nothing until Amazon signs that contract.

hinder90

:/
@NotACPA This has nothing to do with a business arrangement. As I plainly said, Amazon allows customers to download complete CSV reports for any time period for both items ordered as well as orders and shipments. From here you have all of the data needed to manually create these splits and put them in categories if you actually had that much time to spend doing something repetitive, predictable, and tedious - essential what a program or script should obviously be doing.

The larger problem is that Quicken lacks any sort of scripting or macro capacity that would allow you to import a normalized CSV file to, for example, find matching transactions and and make them into splits. Heck, I would be overjoyed if Quicken had an API that I could make an external scripts to do this so I didn’t have to wait for Quicken to implement the feature poorly, like the debit/credit match tool for transfers that could easily be automated, but isn’t.

Rocket J Squirrel

thecreator said:

When dealing with Amazon, you order a lot of items, but they don't ship everything at the same time. They bill the items, when the item is shipped. To Categorize correctly, you need to manually enter the transaction, then match to existing transaction to clear the transaction.

This doesn't work. Amazon can split one order into multiple transactions or combine multiple orders into one. So pre-entered transactions often fail to match what downloads. This is the root of the problem.

NotACPA

hinder90 said:

@NotACPA This has nothing to do with a business arrangement.

It's ENTIRELY a business arrangement.  Q doesn't allow ANY downloads/import into the software without a signed contract.

thecreator

Rocket J Squirrel said:

thecreator said:

When dealing with Amazon, you order a lot of items, but they don't ship everything at the same time. They bill the items, when the item is shipped. To Categorize correctly, you need to manually enter the transaction, then match to existing transaction to clear the transaction.

This doesn't work. Amazon can split one order into multiple transactions or combine multiple orders into one. So pre-entered transactions often fail to match what downloads. This is the root of the problem.

That is so true, but I learn to do this:

1. 
2. Then I would log into Amazon.com and go to my Orders. Print the Invoice for the order in question and save it.
3. Copy and paste the information into Split Description Field of the transaction.
4. Manually Categorize the Description.
   
5. Then match the downloaded transaction with the transaction, just entered.
6. That simple.

Roger_B

Except it should be even simpler than that. When you download your orders from Amazon, they give you a wealth of information on those orders, but the key fields are Date, Total, and Order Number. If you use an Amazon branded Chase Visa, BANG, all three of those are there.

Easy peasy.

Now the trick is to take that information and map it to Quicken, which is not so easy. Honestly, this is just inventory reconciliation, accounting 101. I don't own a business, but due to COVID I am ordering more and more from Amazon and other online retailers because it's safer and easier. I'd really love to be able to match that stuff up.

Other cards are tougher, I get something like this NF7N73K12 from Amex, which I haven't matched it to anything Amazon has.

Bob Myers

I have found that the Amazon order number is downloaded to my Amazon Prime credit card (Chase). However, this data does not appear in the Quicken Inspector. Amazon's transaction data is increasingly complex and we need a better way to correlate Amazon orders with our financial transactions.

Alex115

Matching Amazon credit card charges to Amazon orders is a complete NIGHTMARE.

To make matters worse, Amazon has discontinued its order Export tool for regular/consumer accounts.

I hope Quicken and/or Amazon come up with a solution.

Alex115

I take that back about the Export tool, looks like it's available again:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/b2b/reports

Gbrard

There are only 28 votes for this but I have a feeling there are a LOOOOTTTT more people who want this than 28. Seems completely doable and considering how big Amazon is I would get on it. What happens when microsoft or someone adds this feature? What if they make it exclusive!?!

Chris_QPW

Personally I have recently bought a lot more off of Amazon and seeing how they break up the orders, and trying to figure out what amount goes with what, I don't see how people think this is even doable.  I can't do it as human, and you want a computer program to somehow do it.

Anything it did would be pure guess work, not to mention that the orders and such could be charged to multiple credit cards, gift cards and such, which may or may not even be in Quicken.  And how would all this tied together?

John Campbell

Made the mistake of ordering multiple items on Black Friday. Great deals, but then tracking the purchases in Quicken - OMG! What a mess. Especially if you take advantage of the offer to split the payments over time. Like someone else suggested, I printed out the details of my invoice and then when a charge comes in I go back to my Amazon acct and go to the transaction history to see which invoice was charged and then update the balance on the printed invoice. I'll never do multiple items on a single invoice again!!

thecreator

John Campbell said:

Made the mistake of ordering multiple items on Black Friday. Great deals, but then tracking the purchases in Quicken - OMG! What a mess. Especially if you take advantage of the offer to split the payments over time. Like someone else suggested, I printed out the details of my invoice and then when a charge comes in I go back to my Amazon acct and go to the transaction history to see which invoice was charged and then update the balance on the printed invoice. I'll never do multiple items on a single invoice again!!

Hi @""John Campbell" ,

Why? Sometimes I order items on the same order ID, but when the transactions come in, I find that the items are separated, by shipping. So instead of entering the transactions at the time of purchase, I will wait until the transaction arrives and enter the split information as it goes into the register.

I enter the transactions from the area below the Register, from Downloaded Transactions.

Uncheck the options.

jeremycrandell

Related/unrelated: I've been really impressed with the way the application "Deliveries" (https://junecloud.com/software/mac/deliveries.html) handles identifying Amazon, Apple, FedEx, UPS, etc, transactions by scraping their sites and re-expressing them in a common format.

I don't think that Amazon will move to OFX but Quicken could write an authenticated connector that would accurately pull in those transactions and match them to your financial account.

This would be a useful and appreciated feature.

jwilleke

Well, you can do an import from Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GVWV7WNZCNSXVW66

Laird B

Individual users can automate it, or at least semi-automate it; I just finished a proof-of-concept.

- One time: create an "AmazonDetail" cash account in Quicken.

- Download the line-item-detail erport from Amazon in CSV format.

- Text-transform the Amazon item CSV into a QIF, retaining date and amount, description ("Davidson's Tea Tulsi Pure Leaves, 100-Count Tea Bags") into the Payee field, and Amazon category ("TEA") into the Memo field. (Can be done in Excel.)

- Optionally, during the text transform, use the Amazon category or the UNSPSC to auto-assign categories. (Complex Excel, or code.)

- Import resulting QIF into your AmazonDetail account.

- Assign categories by hand (much easier with "Davidson's Tea Tulsi Pure Leaves, 100-Count Tea Bags" than with "Amzn Mktp US*2A2Z999M0".)

- Optionally, when you pay Amazon, record it as a transfer into the AmazonDetail account, and then reconcile payments against line-items.

I just imported 3 months (about 200 line items) and it took less 10 minutes to categorize them. (Multi-select, right click, assign category helps a lot.)

splasher

If you use ImportQIF (www.quicknperlwiz.com), it can assign the category based on payee for you if they are unique enough.  Using your "Davidson's Tea" example, if it is always the same, ImportQIF can deal with it.  With the non-unique payees, you can leave them blank and fill them in in Quicken.

Keystone435

Laird B using your csv --> qif method, how do you match with credit card entries? All of the Amazon transactions would be in a "AmazonDetail" cash account and separate from the credit card account associated with the Amazon account. What am I missing?