Is there a way to obtain more descriptive information for Amazon payments?

Bob Myers

All transactions only have "Amazon" in the Payee description. Having order # or product description would help with reconcilement.

jacobs

First, I would suggest that having a consistent Payee name Amazon is what you should want, because it allows you to look up the Payee in the future. Things like order number or product description would typically be recorded in the Memo/Notes field.

As for what data might be available, that depends on what your credit card company is transmitting to Quicken, and how Quicken then handles it. To see that, click on one of the transactions and select Show Inspector on the View menu. That will pop up a window which shows all the field associated with this transaction. At the bottom is a section called "From your financial institution" which includes "FI Payee" and "FI Notes"; these show exactly how your credit card company transmits the Payee name and notes.

If you see the Payee name is other than "Amazon", and is something you prefer, you can go to Quicken Preferences > Connected Services and try checking the box for "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories". Note that this is a global change, so it might have undesirable consequences for some of your other downloads -- but it's something you can try to see if you like the results more or less.

In my experience, the odds that a credit card company would receive from Amazon something like a product description and pass that on seems extremely unlikely. (What would they send if your order has 5 items?) What I think many people do is download their transactions and then manually edit selected transactions like this to enter whatever is useful to them in the Memo/Notes field. While editing, you might also create splits on your transaction to be able to have different items on an order in different categories and have different notes. (I make extensive use of Memo/Notes, so I can later search for specific things I might want, like when we bought our washing machine or how many bags of mulch I bought last year at Home Depot.)

jacobs

First, I would suggest that having a consistent Payee name Amazon is what you should want, because it allows you to look up the Payee in the future. Things like order number or product description would typically be recorded in the Memo/Notes field.

As for what data might be available, that depends on what your credit card company is transmitting to Quicken, and how Quicken then handles it. To see that, click on one of the transactions and select Show Inspector on the View menu. That will pop up a window which shows all the field associated with this transaction. At the bottom is a section called "From your financial institution" which includes "FI Payee" and "FI Notes"; these show exactly how your credit card company transmits the Payee name and notes.

If you see the Payee name is other than "Amazon", and is something you prefer, you can go to Quicken Preferences > Connected Services and try checking the box for "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories". Note that this is a global change, so it might have undesirable consequences for some of your other downloads -- but it's something you can try to see if you like the results more or less.

In my experience, the odds that a credit card company would receive from Amazon something like a product description and pass that on seems extremely unlikely. (What would they send if your order has 5 items?) What I think many people do is download their transactions and then manually edit selected transactions like this to enter whatever is useful to them in the Memo/Notes field. While editing, you might also create splits on your transaction to be able to have different items on an order in different categories and have different notes. (I make extensive use of Memo/Notes, so I can later search for specific things I might want, like when we bought our washing machine or how many bags of mulch I bought last year at Home Depot.)