Ability to sync Amazon/Major Retailer/Big Box order details [edited] (1 Merged Vote)

jonathanhle
jonathanhle Member ✭✭
edited September 2022 in Feature Requests
Just about 100% of the people I know have an Amazon account at this point.  It would be amazing to have some workflow/features that would help us split the credit card charges by the Amazon purchase details, when categorizing/splitting.

I know someone wrote an Amazon order detail syncing thing for another product, just hoping in the future simplifi is able to do something similar.  
210 votes

In Review · Last Updated

We are currently reviewing options for this request!

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Comments

  • scottnliz
    scottnliz Member ✭✭✭✭
    Yes.  Also would love to have more detailed categorization/breakdown of purchases at Walmart between groceries and other things. 
  • Katsei
    Katsei Member
    Simplifi does such a beautiful job of categorizing transactions with the exception of Amazon. Is there any plans to request Amazon use a code within their vendor transaction to indicate a general categorization for groceries, services, entertainment, clothing, pets etc? 

    I’m spending a lot of time trying to break down my purchases from Amazon.  As many people already know, Amazon will take an entire order and break it into 10 packages and charges.
  • Shaun252
    Shaun252 Member
    Hello, I see that this has been brought up already but sifting through Amazon and/or PayPal purchases remains tedious. Is there any movement on improving the categorization of these types of purchases?
  • Coach Natalie
    Coach Natalie Administrator, Moderator admin
    Hello @Shaun252,

    Thank you for taking the time to post to the Community!

    I have gone ahead and merged your post with an existing Idea post requesting this same type of ability. Although I'm not currently aware of any plans to implement anything like this, you'll definitely want to follow this post for any future updates.

    Please let me know if you have any questions! :smile:

    -Coach Natalie
  • jondehen
    jondehen Member ✭✭
    @Coach Natalie other financial aggregators (not naming names) pull the full payee name which includes the product.  Specifically, this is for the Synchrony Amazon Prime Store Card.

    For example, here's the same transaction:

    Simplifi: Amazon
    Others (including Synchrony): AMAZON RETAIL SEATTLE WA Cerama Bryte Cooktop Cleaning SHIPPING AND TAX

    I'm going to guess that it's probably a separate field than what Simplifi is pulling.  Yes, the Payee IS Amazon, but not pulling the full transaction details is real disadvantage Simplifi has.  We cannot create rules around these transactions to automatically categorize them.

    Can you have your developers check the API for this connection?  Thank you!
  • jondehen
    jondehen Member ✭✭
    @"Coach Natalie" I discovered (with help from chat support) that the entire transaction IS being pulled into Simplifi, but it's only visible when the transaction is expanded. So the feature request is to add that text to the Payee, or provide other means of created rules based on the full transaction text.
  • jondehen
    jondehen Member ✭✭
    @Coach Natalie
    do you have any thoughts of feedback on using the transaction details (which has the product name) for certain accounts?  I greatly miss auto-categorizing my embarrassingly large amount of subscribe and save purchases.  This is the number one time sucker by far in my experience.
  • Coach Natalie
    Coach Natalie Administrator, Moderator admin
    Hello @jondehen,

    Thanks for reaching out!

    I know that our Product Team is considering options for this request, however, I'm not sure what exactly they're looking at to make it happen. I agree that this would be a great enhancement to Simplifi, especially for Amazon -- it would no doubt save a lot of people a lot of time!

    I will be sure to keep everyone posted as soon as we receive an update from our Team on this. :blush:

    -Coach Natalie
  • barjohn
    barjohn Member ✭✭
    I agree with this suggestion but would add ability to categorize by the account making the payment and or amount of payment (looking beyond Amazon).
  • flav
    flav Member
    +1

    Thanks!
  • Posted this before but I wanted to shed some more light on the topic because of its importance to me. 

    When we buy from Amazon (for example), Simplifi is completely oblivious as to whether the purchase was grocery delivery or books or a trash can. This is not that difficult of a problem to solve!

    As an example, Shopify integrates with large big box stores and they use access to personal email, and so they parse from your emails what categories your purchase actually was. If Shopify can separate out these items and knows what they are, then Simplifi should be able to do the same.

    I don't want to have to go into my Amazon account or my CC account and then have to manually transcribe every single purchase. 

    In addition, this would be a really easy way to track refunds. Right now the refund tracker is very manual. I'd love for that to be automated as well. 
  • Could do a landscape analysis on how Shopify works via the Shop app. 

    In addition, the way that Amazon splits up charges and the way that Simplifi shows them often don't match. I think Amazon thinks about an order as a whole and Simplifi somehow breaks up Amazon orders into shipments. This makes it super tedious to figure out what an order actually was because then we have to not just look at our Amazon order history but we also need to open up the receipts and do a bunch of math to figure out what that charge was referencing. I would love if this could be automated.
  • Flopbot
    Flopbot Superuser ✭✭✭✭✭
    @Skater,

    You said: "In addition, the way that Amazon splits up charges and the way that Simplifi shows them often don't match."

    If I understand what you're saying, I suspect that I've had similar experiences.  However this isn't something that Simplifi - or any other personal finance software - is doing...Simplifi just represents how the CC transactions downloaded to your physical bank account.  Remember that Simplifi offers a one way data transfer from your Bank > Simplifi and there is no way to reverse it (i.e. you can't schedule money to move between bank account from Simplifi).  When I used Quicken back in the day, I had this problem A LOT and eventually tracked down an Underlying Problem (see below) that, ultimately, resided with Amazon.  Whenever it occurs, the only way I've found to troubleshoot it is by  referencing Amazon > Orders > View Order Details > Transactions and doing a bunch of tedious math like you mentioned.

    For whatever reason, I seem to notice this more when buying clothing through Amazon than any other item.

    Do let me know if I'm misunderstanding your statement.


    Underlying Problem:

    My wife purchased one (1) shirt from Amazon for $32.79 awhile back.  She paid online one (1) time.  Her cart had one (1) item in it.  The shirt was shipped in one (1) box.  For some unknown reason, Amazon split that one (1) original charge ($32.79) into two (2) separate charges ($21.76 & $11.03).  To this day I have no idea why.  It's like I got charged separately for the arm or something.

    In total, for just this one shirt, it took me around 30-45 minutes to track down what happened and then reconcile my bank account.  Thank you Amazon!



    Chris
    Quicken Desktop user since 2014.
    New to Simplifi in 2021.
  • This feature would be an amazing time saver and accuracy improver for me too!  It would be even better if the tool could help with splitting and categorizing purchases from Amazon and other big box retailers like Target, Costco, etc.
  • djbradp1
    djbradp1 Member
    jondehen said:
    @Coach Natalie I discovered (with help from chat support) that the entire transaction IS being pulled into Simplifi, but it's only visible when the transaction is expanded. So the feature request is to add that text to the Payee, or provide other means of created rules based on the full transaction text.
    Yes we need very much to be able to create rules based on the additional details for many use cases.  i.e. paypal has a account code in the additional details i could base a rule off of for reoccuring.
  • Amazon includes information about what a transaction is for. The transaction Detail popup has "Appears on your Amazon Store Card statement as AMAZON RETAIL SEATTLE WA. Optimus Vega 4 Season Dual Mod on Jan 7, 2023.". I understand from Simplifi support that this is actually the original value in the Payee field when you download from Synchrony. It would be very useful if the CSV file could include this in a separate field.

    Right now, I can cut-and-paste this into 
    Notes, but it would be useful not to have to do that. I guess this is done via a hidden renaming rule. Being able to turn that off could suffice.

    I observe this on Amazon, but other institutions may also do this.
  • any news on this?? Did simplifi already implement something like this?
  • Coach Natalie
    Coach Natalie Administrator, Moderator admin
    Hello @ycastellanos,

    Thanks for reaching out!

    If you navigate to the very top of this request, you'll see that the status is "In Review" with a note stating that our Product Team is currently reviewing options for this request. There has been no further update provided, so please be sure to continue following along here for future updates. 

    I hope this helps!

    -Coach Natalie
  • MehulAmin
    MehulAmin Member
    edited July 2023

    [removed] - any update on this?

  • benk
    benk Member

    Another vote - this would make a huge difference for me

  • This would be awesome to have!

  • I'm not even sure if this is possible but here it goes.

    I use Amazon a LOT and would LOVE a feature that would reconcile the purchased product name adding it to the notes field based on the purchase price.

    Currently, I do this manually, and it would be very useful to have it automatically done.

  • RobWilk
    RobWilk Superuser ✭✭✭✭✭

    I don't think amazon puts the products purchased on the charge description, which would make this difficult to impossible (I imagine, but maybe i'm wrong), however on my Prime Store Card the website does seem to list at least some of the items in a purchase.

    I will for now (I may change my mind) vote for this with the knowledge that it might not be possible, as you point out.


    Rob Wilkens

  • Yeah, it wouldn't be simple to implement…I would think you would need to add your Amazon account in the accounts section for this to work.

  • RobWilk
    RobWilk Superuser ✭✭✭✭✭

    If Amazon was added as (like) a bank account, the way paypal can (which also has some issues people have been complaining about), then the credit card charges could be treated like 'transfers' to the amazon 'bank account.' This way the charge would only be in one place.


    Rob Wilkens

  • Yes, this can be done!! I love how Intuit Quickbooks Self-Employed has figured this out. Now I need this on the personal side. There's just too many different categories that an Amazon purchase could fall under. Without this feature, it's difficult to try and budget.

  • asheroto
    asheroto Member ✭✭

    This would be excellent! Even if it simply had a link to the order page, that would be helpful.