Has anyone figured a good process for categorizing their Amazon purchases and bringing them in?
It would be nice if Amazon categorized all of our purchases in some sort of dashboard, but it doesn't.
I know there's a way to output all your Amazon purchases to a .CSV file and bring them into Simplifi, but then there's the problem of double-counting the purchases.
Has anyone figured out a good process for this that's not too painstaking?
Comments
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Here's what I do:
- Don't let it build up. Every couple of days, look through the cleared transactions (I try not to modify them while still pending) that are not yet marked Reviewed. For each one, search that amount in my email to pull up the amazon order. (I've got 2 monitors so I can keep simplifi on one and my email/web browser on the other.) Click the link in the email to see what the item was, and categorize the transaction. (If it was multiple items in different categories, I use Splits.) As I process each one, I mark it with the Reviewed checkmark.
- Once a month I get a bunch of items via Subscribe and Save. These charges come through all within a day or two (or three?) and since I do not get an email receipt for each item, I can't use step 1 for these. Instead, once all the charges have cleared (usually a day or so after the S&S items are all delivered), I go to amazon.com/orders on one screen. On the other, I have Simplifi filtered to show me transactions that are not reviewed with the payee "Amazon". I look through the orders and for each that was a Subscribe & Save, I search (manually or using the search box) for that amount in Simplifi, categorize, and mark it as Reviewed.
- If plan to return an item, I don't mark that transaction as Reviewed until I get the refund. This way, the transaction shows up in my list of unreviewed transactions to remind me to take care of the return. (I rarely use the refund tracker since I'm worried if I mark an item as Reviewed I will forget to return it.)
Writing all that up makes it look a lot more painstaking than it is, in reality it's just a couple of minutes of work every few days, plus more once a month with the Subscribe and Save order (if you use that).
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Well, we make 2-3 orders at Amazon every other week. When a charge comes in, I review it and categorize it right then. I have to amazon.com to get an invoice. Then I wait for them to clear.
The problem arises when Amazon for reasons past understanding divides an order into two shipments BUT doesn't change the invoice. In that case, like Sherlock Holmes, one has to figure out what item(s) are in the charge and what the tax was (it's 8% in AL) and sometimes deduct Cash Back. Fun, fun, fun!
If you make lots of charges to Amazon, I don't envy you.
Steve
Quicken Simplifi (Safari & iOS) Since 2021
Quicken Classic (MacOS) Since 20091 -
I place my Amazon orders by category, this makes it much easier to track accurately. My record for Amazon deliveries in one day is 7.
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@lts ,
This has worked well for me although I honestly don't have a ton of Amazon transactions to deal with; on subscription and 4-6 random transactions per month. For our one Amazon subscription, I set up a recurring series for it. After a bit of fiddling with dates and match criteria, Simplifi does a really reliable recognizing this transaction when it comes in and categorizing it properly. In theory, as long as your transactions are scattered out throughout the month and all aren't for the same exact amount, I don't see why this wouldn't scale for more transactions.
I then have these rules set up too…
Hope you find something useful here.
Chris
Spreadsheet user since forever.
Quicken Desktop user since 2014.
Quicken Simplifi user since 2021.3 -
Thanks all! Seems like everyone has their own method that works for them. I like the rules thing might looks into that…
For the Amazon purchases analytics I decided to go brute force and just do it in Google Sheets, using AI to help me automatically categorize the items purchased. Took me many hours but I ended up getting a pretty good sense of my spending over the last decade in different categories.
I definitely make most of my purchases on Amazon, but I just stopped my Prime subscription as I have a feeling it will help me spend less on there. Also Amazon removed a bunch of very convenient wish list features, which makes my shopping experience on Amazon extremely cumbersome. Ironically this will also help me spend less.1 -
I too find it frustating, and like EL123, I just keep my Amazon orders window up as I'm going through transactions so I can categorize them.
The most helpful thing I did was to create a rule to put all Amazon transactions into category "Unknown" so I wouldn't mistakenly take Simplifi's default category.
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Or maybe a category called "Amazon"? I think I might do that myself. That way at least I can see my overall Amazon spending.
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That makes sense! I have them set to default to the Shopping category which has a bunch of subcategories, when I categorize I don't leave things as Shopping so if I see one it means I need to adjust it. I also mark transactions as Reviewed only once the category is correct, so I can filter to show the unreviewed ones to see any action that needs to be taken (I also leave them unreviewed if it's an item I want to return, or something I need to get reimbursed for).
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Same. though I didnt set it up that way intentionally. its a category I used to use before I reorganized things. But once I noticed that it has this effect, I wound up leaving it as it is.
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Same here, I guess it was the default for Amazon and other retailers.
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creating a rule to mark as Uncategoried works for me. Like others, I still go in manually to match up the amounts to the purchase category or split manually as needed.
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For me I've found that the key is not to let it build up. I try to go through and categorize every few days / every week at minimum.
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or… just stop buying so much stuff from Amazon 🤣 … just kidding,
Danny
Simplifi user since 01/22
”Budget: a mathematical confirmation of your suspicions.” ~A.A. Latimer2
