Has anyone figured a good process for categorizing their Amazon purchases and bringing them in?

lts
lts Member
in Categories and Tags

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?

Tagged:

Answers

  • EL1234
    EL1234 Member ✭✭✭✭
    edited 6:00AM

    Here's what I do:

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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).

Categories