Retail Purchase Categorization and Amazon statement do not match up

Question

I got my first Amazon credit card statement since setting up the Retail Purchase Categorization.  When I chose View Orders a bunch of transactions show up but then when I chose Download & Match Orders it says No Matches Found.  When I looked harder at the results I realized that both the dates and the amounts in the View Orders do not match the dates and amounts in the credit card statement.  Hence No Matches Found.  Out of 21 transactions I found 2 that had the right amount with a different date, the other 19 had wrong amounts & dates.  I can see where there could be an issue between the dates, but the dollar amounts???

Chris_QPW · Answer

That is because Amazon doesn't have a "Shipping History".  At best they update the item order history.

The dates are never going to match.  There is the order date, then the ship date, and this is when they actually charge the credit card, and then that charge has to post.  And it gets even more confusing when Amazon breaks up orders.

What the Quicken web browser is doing is screen scraping the order pages on Amazon to get the order details and then sending that information to your Quicken Cloud dataset for your Quicken Desktop data file.

There is a lot of "AI guessing" being done here.

This again is one of those kinds of feature where the users say "I want this, make it work, I don't care how hard it is to do." where there isn't a good interface for doing it so Quicken Inc is just "hacking" at it.  It will never be a really clean interaction.

It is "sort of" working for us, but the more frequent and complicated ones orders are the more likely it will do the "wrong thing".  Not to mention there are some clear bugs in the process.

The only reasons I even keep it on is because the memos are nice and I'm curious of how well it performs just to gauge it for talking about it on this forum.  But in truth it causes me more work than less.   Our orders from Amazon break into to main categories stuff my wife buys for decorations and ribbons and stuff like that which I categorize as entertainment, and stuff I buy for the house or computer which I categorize as household or computer.  By far most of the orders are my wife's so I have set the default category to entertainment and only change it for my orders.  But with retail categorization there is no way to tell it what categories to use and it tends to categorize hers as gifts, and as such I'm now changing every category as they come in.

DonJames · Answer

Thanks for the reply.  Everything you said makes sense.  However I am beginning to think that the whole thing is not worth the effort.  BTW, I'll be darned if I can find the Amazon screen "Shipment History" instead of "Order History".

The Keeper · Answer

See if this is at all helpful………………

Mismatched amounts and dates in Quicken's Retail Purchase Categorization usually happen because Amazon charges your credit card when an item ships, not when you place the order, and often groups multiple orders into a single combined charge.

Why Amounts and Dates Don’t Match

* Split Shipments: One single order on Amazon with multiple items can ship separately, resulting in several smaller charges on your credit card that match nothing in a single order total.
* Combined Charges: Amazon frequently bundles multiple smaller orders placed on different days into one single credit card charge matching the combined total.
* Order Date vs. Post Date: The date in your Amazon order history is the purchase date, while the credit card statement shows the shipping/authorization date, which can lag by several days. I use a Discover card for Amazon purchases and typically the transaction date on my Discover Card statement is different than the order date on the Amazon invoice. For example, I may place an order on Amazon on September 28th but by Discover card statement shows that transaction on September 30th. 
* Tax and Shipping Adjustments: Final calculations for tax or promotional discounts sometimes alter the final settled dollar amount compared to the initial checkout estimate.

Steps to try to Fix or Work Around It

* Check for Bundled Totals: Look at your credit card statement total and see if it equals the sum of two or three smaller Amazon orders.
* Match by Shipment: Go to your Amazon account and review "Shipment History" rather than "Order History" to align with billing dates.
* Disconnect and Re-sync: Refresh the browser extension and re-run One Step Update if the plugin is failing to pull settled data