American Express Account with Multiple Cardholders

Tom Tolles

I have an American Express account with five different cardholders so that each person has their own card number that all get billed to a single account. It is easy to tell which person has made a purchase by logging into the AMEX online. However, I cannot distinguish between cardholders when I download the transactions into Quicken. As a result, I have to have login into AMEX and have Quicken open and go through each transaction manually in order to figure out who did each charge. Is there anyway to figure out who the cardholder is from inside of Quicken? Maybe from the Transaction Inspector? Any help would be appreciated.

Best,
Tom

Quicken Paloma

Hello @Tom Tolles, 

Thank you for reaching out to Quicken Community. I apologize you are having this issue. The information you are needing is very specific and unfortunately, this is not available in Quicken. If there are multiple cardholders but only one account, there is no way for Quicken to detect which transaction is from which cardholder. I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused. 

If you would like I can turn the post into an idea, so that other users may vote on the idea. If there is enough demand for it then it could be considered as a feature to implement in future releases. 

Hope this helps. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns. 

-Quicken Paloma 

Tom Tolles

Thanks for the reply. I am going to check with AMEX to see if there is some special identifier I can use to filter within Quicken. Will advise!

Tom Tolles

Hi Paloma - I have exported a file directly from American Express for quicken (activity.qfx) that has a number of transactions in it. I can't seem to attached that qfx file directly to this message but here is a screen grab (Activity from AMEX v2pdf) that shows a part of the QFX as it shows in Excel.

Please note that one of the columns is called this -

/CREDITCARDMSGSRSV1/CCSTMTTRNRS/CCSTMTRS/BANKTRANLIST/STMTTRN/MEMO

Please note the yellow highlighted row. You can see the value of this column shows as:

KATHERINE L TOLLES-42026-00607504 323-464-4444 HOLLYWOOD TOYS & COSTUME 0 LOS ANGELES CA

You can see that the card holder's name (Katherine) clearly shows up.

I have also attached a screen grab from inside of Quicken showing the Transaction Inspector. In this image, you can see that the "Statement Memo" field in Quicken shows a value of:

00607504 323-464-4444"

which is a subset of the the entire value of that column. Please note that the above transactions was imported into Quicken using Direct Connect.

Now check this out - I created a test Quicken file and manually imported the QFX file I downloaded from American Express and guess what I found? See the file called "Transaction Inspector - Manual Import from QFX where you will note that the Transaction Inspector field called "Statement Memo" has the entire value of the column included the cardholdler's name.

This entire value also shows up in the "Quicken Name" field and the "Payee" fields, both of which are a mashup of the "Statement Payee" and the "Statement Memo" fields.

Long story short - is appears that Quicken does have access to the information that I seek. It also appears that Quicken's QFX file import function differs from Direct Connect.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Best,
Tom Tolles

Quicken Paloma

Hello @Tom Tolles, 

Thank you for the additional information and screenshot. You are correct in the aspect that Direct Connect and QFX (web connect) differ. While they are both provided specifically from the bank, they are obtained in different manners. Since you were able to obtain the information needed/desired, I would suggest switching the connection method and testing it further. This is however to your discretion ultimately. I apologize for giving somewhat of a vague answer before but there are limits to what I can test with the resources available to me and not all financial institutions will work out this nicely. Again your feedback and effort are appreciated!

Please let us know if you come across any errors or have questions/concerns. 

-Quicken Paloma 

wjk940

I have this same need. Quicken Paloma I'd appreciate you creating a story for this feature request, so the production manager can consider for a future release.

One of the core features of American Express is multiple cards, each with a primary account number, on the account. This is an important feature for parents with kids at college, business travelers (separating reimbursable expenses for personal), and I'm sure other use cases.

jacobs

@Tom Tolles @wjk940" Let's parse this a bit… The OFX standard which financial institutions use to provide data to financial software such as Quicken doesn't have any provision— no separate field — for tracking cardholders. Tom showed includes the cardholder name in the memo field transmitted by the financial institution. The memo field is entirely up to the financial institution to fill with whatever data they want, and as Paloma indicated, every financial institution does it differently. So there's no way Quicken could automatically discern and break out a cardholder name.

When you use Direct Connect, Quicken connects directly to the financial institution's server, and downloads data directly with no translation of fields. When you use Quicken Connect or download a QFX file, the financial institution may or may not format each of the fields identically. In this case, it seems AmEx is populating the fields differently in the QFX file than it is when you Direct Connect. There is nothing Quicken can do about that; it can only deal with the data the financial institution is providing. 

However, the imported QFX file seems to show a path forward, if Quicken would agree to fix it. What I would term a bug is that the Notes field in Quicken is not inheriting the text from the Statement Memo field sent by Amex. I think it should. Instead, it is concatenating the Statement Payee name and the Statement Memo field into Quicken's Payee name. What you would want is for the Statement Payee to populate the Quicken Payee field, and the Statement Memo to populate Quicken's Memo field. Then, you could see the names of your different cardholders in the Memo/Notes field, and use Quicken's Search to view just one cardholder at a time.

(If you wanted, you could then periodically do a search for of the Memo field for "Katherine", select the found transactions, and mass edit them to add a Tag of Katherine. Repeat for other cardholders. And then you could create reports based on the Tags if you wanted to see how much was spent by each cardholder in a time period, or jus the transactions of a particular cardholder. It would require this manual search and edit process every month or periodically, but if it would be useful enough to do that work, you could get there. If Quicken would make Notes = Statement Memo on import.)

So that's what I'd report as a bug via Report a Problem: the Statement Memo field is not populating the Quicken Memo/Notes field. If they fix that, you could then see the cardholder names in the memo field. This doesn't depend on AmEx; it's an import mapping problem with Quicken. Asking them to do more to separate cardholders for AmEx, I'd expect it to fall of deaf ears; if you ask them to fix a bug in the mapping of the import fields, hopefully they'd agree it needs to be fixed.

Now the bad news: when you use Report a Problem, it's a black hole; you will not hear any feedback. Worse: you have no way of knowing if they see the problem and agree, see the problem and disagree, or don't even see/understand the problem. And even if they agree it should be fixed, there's no way to know how long it might take until they make the change. But that doesn't make it worth not trying! And perhaps if fellow AmEx users with multiple cardholders report the same issue as a bug, it will get put on their radar to address.