I buy a great deal of goods from Amazon for both business and the home, and while I have separate business and personal Amazon accounts there is still no way to categorize my purchases (especially orders with multiple items) without a manual review of the order and manually making splits and assigning categories. This doesn’t require any collaboration with Amazon. This can be achieved using the daA they provide their customers freely!
When viewing your user account data on the Amazon site, there is an option where you download complete reports for any time period in CSV format. There are two types of reports. Both are required to itemize your orders, but together they contain all of the data necessary to fully automate this process with little to now user intervention.
(1) All of the individual Amazon orders with order number along with the transaction details such as date, payment method, and order total. It also breaks the order total into total COG, sales tax, “Subscribe-and-Save” discount, gift card balance, and credit card reward points.
(2) All of the items ordered from Amazon along with their order number, quantity, item price, and some redundant info like payment method.
The goal here is to use this imported data to create complete item splits out of existing transaction that match the date and order total from report (1). Next, append the Amazon order number to the transaction somewhere so it can be referenced later. Now split the transaction and add lines for sales tax and other items (credits, discounts, etc...) from report (1) Finally, parse report (2) and match each item to its respective Amazon order number and add each item to the existing split lines for that transactions.
Once the transaction’s splits are completed (or more likely as each split line is added) Quicken can assign categories per the user’s existing rules so that all a user needs to do is categorize any items which haven’t been done so already. Also, with the Amazon order number saved in each Quicken transaction’s info, it can avoid duplicates as well!
Presently the only way to do this is manually. While I’m grateful Amazon has provided the data in an easy-to-use format, the process of correlating it with transactions is the kind of task an algorithm really should be doing, not a human being trying to manage their cash flow.
Please consider this!
