Import Amazon order reports to create transaction splits
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@jacobs, and how do you expect to limit CSV import to Amazon only. It's when ALL of the users start CSV import that Q begins to lose money because the FI's won't be willing to pay Q as much.
Q user since February, 1990. DOS Version 4
Now running Quicken Windows Subscription, Business & Personal
Retired "Certified Information Systems Auditor" & Bank Audit VP0 -
That is not what Quicken Inc has been telling us from the day that it was established.
It is Intuit that gets any kind of income from this, and even that "isn't what it used to be".
Quicken Inc pays Intuit for the service as their aggregator. This is cost for Quicken Inc, not income.
Even when talking about Intuit, it has always been stated that Intuit got (and no one knows if they still get it) money for supporting Direct Connect and Web Connect, but not for Express Web Connect and Express Web Connect +. This has been stated as the very reason that the credit unions (at first and others later) dropped Direct Connect/Web Connect in favor of Express Web Connect, no charges by Intuit. It is ironic from Intuit's perspective since they were getting income from Direct Connect/Web Connect which beyond a doubt were less costly to maintain than Express Web Connect, but basically it was market driven.
Now there is no telling if Intuit has insisted on a license agreement with Quicken Inc that restricts what Quicken Inc can provide, but I have a feeling that it isn't that.
No developer/company wants to take on something like CSV that has no standard. Intuit took on the "nonstandard" of Express Web Connect" mostly because they had no choice. The financial institutions were just not going to establish any kind of standard for this, and so they had to do what they did.
Quicken Inc doesn't want to be in the same business. My guess is that the main reason they have always resisted this option is because they don't want to have to support it. They have enough "connection problems" to deal with just with what is already offered.
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P.S. I should note one thing, I was mostly talking about a generic CSV import. If they targeted one place like Amazon then it might be "more supportable", but it would open the can of worms that they probably don't want to touch. You will note that they did do exactly this kind of thing to get the Mint customers to change to Quicken.
EDIT: How ironic is this! I just finished writing this and notice a Rant post where someone is having problems importing Mint data (in Quicken Windows I think).
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Split transactions from general goods retailers are the bane of PFM transaction management and IMO one of the big reasons more people don't use PFMs. No normal person is going to sift through dozens or more transactions every week and whack them up to accurately reflect spending categories.
Back in the day there was an app/service/add-on called OneReceipt. It's original purpose was to track expenses for reimbursement but it was marevlously flexible in conjunction with PFM apps and software. You could install it in Chrome, open Mint, and it would split up Amazon, etc. transactions based on items in the description.
Because Mint allowed you to yay or nay whether you wanted to continue using a certain category for particular items, you only had to manually set the category one time for items you purchased more than once. And actually IIRC OneReceipt did a decent job getting the category right the first time. From there you could download the correctly categorized CSV from Mint and import it into QMac. Still a lot more work than it should be to accurately categorize purchases from Amazon, Target, etc. but at least it was feasible.
Alas, OneReceipt's developers mothballed the program to focus on business billing solutions, and OneReceipt's dedicated user base wailed and moaned.
Quicken Premier Mac and Windows0 -
@mistertheplague "No normal person is going to sift through dozens or more transactions every week and whack them up to accurately reflect spending categories."
I guess that makes me non-normal. My state doesn't have an income tax, so I can deduct Sales Tax on my IRS 1040. So, I split almost all transactions, as soon as received, to reflect what was bought (e.g., groceries, wine, pharmacy, tax from Kroger) and the pertinent categories.
It has been my experience, over many years, that what I actually pay in Sales Tax is double what the IRS tables suggest. If I'm ever audited by the IRS, I can PROVE what I actually paid.
Splitting out the transactions is also for my Budget … so I can tell how much was spent on what.
Q user since February, 1990. DOS Version 4
Now running Quicken Windows Subscription, Business & Personal
Retired "Certified Information Systems Auditor" & Bank Audit VP0 -
IMO, that would definitely make you non-normal LOL. Though yours is an excellent use case in favor of going to the trouble. IIRC there were quite a few OneReceipt users who used the Mint add on for that purpose. They set up a "Taxes" tag in Mint and the sales tax left over from the transactions OneReceipt categorized got rolled up under the tax tag for quick review when filing their taxes.
For many of us who are not — pardon the pun — CPAs, manually categorizing such transactions would be a mind-numbing slog. Speaking only for myself, the time it requires alone makes it prohibitive even if it was something I wanted to do. Instead I try to order like groups of items from Amazon, e.g., and handle categorization that way. I've also been known to ring up certain items separately at the store.
Quicken Premier Mac and Windows0 -
I've been manually splitting & categorizing transactions as necessary since I started using Quicken in 1990; it's just automatic at this point & I don't even notice the extra seconds it takes to split things up anymore. I suppose it must seem different to folks who grew up with the internet & downloadable transactions always available but that stuff still seems like a bit of a luxury to me.
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^^ THIS ^^
I'm exactly the same @Jon. Yes, it takes a little time to spit my Amazon or Home Depot transactions, but not so much that it deters me, and certainly not a "mind-numbing slog." So @mistertheplague, add me to the "non-normal" group! 😂
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19930 -
@mistertheplague As my signature line indicates I'm "Not A CPA". Rather, I'm a retired CISA. My license was systems oriented and I didn't need to concern myself with "timing and recognition of income and expenses". It was all "current" to me and the computer.
The very few people who have both, I've met a few, will tell you that a CISA is every bit as difficult to obtain as a CPA … they're just differently oriented.
The last 5 years at the bank were I was an Audit VP, I was also the manager for Audit's "Computer Fraud Investigations Unit", euphemistically called "Research & Development". Audit recruited me because when I was in Systems Development for that bank I designed, built and managed their main "money mover" system. Audit realized that the CPAs knew what was SUPPOSED to happen.
I knew what REALLY happened with money moving thru the bank. When I read in the WSJ one morning about Nation's Bank (subsequently bought by BofA) being fined $7.5M for failing to report large currency transactions, I took my insight to
Audit management, who shut down audits to focus for a month on currency transactions.We were fined $100K, which we gladly paid, because with that fine came absolution for prior sins.
Q user since February, 1990. DOS Version 4
Now running Quicken Windows Subscription, Business & Personal
Retired "Certified Information Systems Auditor" & Bank Audit VP0 -
I haven’t been in this forum for quite some time, as I haven’t actually used Quicken in a couple of years, but I’m delighted to see most of the same cast of crotchety, iconoclastic PFM power users roaming the halls. I wonder if NoWayJose still exists.
Anyway, each to their own I suppose. Personally I’d rather have someone slam my hand in a drawer for an hour and a half than manually enter split transactions. Life is short.
Quicken Premier Mac and Windows0 -
So, do you not use the budget function? Or do you budget by Store Name, where "Kroger" (or, whatever) is a single budget line no matter what you bought there?
That would be MOST misleading as I buy everything from grocery to gasoline to medicine to wine & beer at my local store.
But I suppose that info is more valuable to me that it appears to be to you. I suspect that a spreadsheet would satisfy you.
Q user since February, 1990. DOS Version 4
Now running Quicken Windows Subscription, Business & Personal
Retired "Certified Information Systems Auditor" & Bank Audit VP0 -
I'm with @mistertheplague in that manual entry let alone split are a "no way" for me. When I started with Quicken downloading wasn't possible, and I only lasted about a 1 1/2 like that and had much simpler finances back then. I didn't start using Quicken again until I was able to download transactions.
The way I handle Amazon purchases is that I don't have it categorize them during the download and when they do download I almost 100% of the time just categorize it with one category, no splitting. This is possible because we don't create orders with lots of different categories. And the new pending transactions are actually helping because they show up really quickly and I can turn them into a regular transaction with the right category while I still know what it is without going back to Amazon to remember it. And then that transaction gets matched to the downloaded one when it clears.
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