Personal-finance filter: how to keep track of shared Amazon card?

January 25, 2021 8:08 AM

My wife and I share an Amazon card for personal and family purchases on Amazon.com. We use Mint to keep track of all our expenses but it doesn't have any visibility into the Amazon purchases. Any ideas on how to manage this better?

Idea 1: The only thing I can think of is sharing our Amazon logins and looking at the other's order history, when desired. This is pretty cumbersome and doesn't scale very well.

Idea 2: Killing our personal accounts and creating a new shared Amazon account would also be a pain with our Kindle and Alexa devices (but possible).

Here is an example of why this an issue for us: we thought we were on top of our subscriptions, but found a bunch under Amazon (like Showtime and Starz). These were steadily racking up fees but were sneaking past our subscription-radar by hiding in the general Amazon bucket. The only way I found them was to sit there in Mint and search for "9.99", "8.99", etc.

Thanks for your help!

posted by cgs to Work & Money (14 answers total)

I worked around this by using my Amazon card for less, when I could help it - I route all household-related expenses through a totally different card, even when the purchase is on Amazon, than my personal-stuff card. The added clarity is worth way more than a % or two difference in cash back, to me.

(This is not a perfect solution and the bundling of lots of things under "amazon" or "apple" is still a constant frustration for those of us who pay close attention to our spending. Sigh.)
posted by Tomorrowful at 8:27 AM on January 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

So this isn't a convenient solution, but maybe just make a point of manually logging each Amazon purchase as you make it in Mint or maybe a shared Google Sheet. (I don't know Mint so I don't know how well it lets you do stuff like that.)

If you're not organized enough to do that as part of your process (e.g. if you buy stuff via Alexa or some other push-to-buy thingy), you may need to disable those and restrict yourselves to purchasing stuff from Amazon on only that computer which also has a handy shortcut to the log. This is significantly less convenient but it also forces you to be more deliberate about buying stuff, which may be worthwhile on its own.
posted by suetanvil at 8:27 AM on January 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

I use a variant of this script to import my Apple Card transactions into Mint once a month; but I haven't found a better solution for Amazon than manually editing every transaction by looking at my order history. (This claims to do it but I haven't been able to get that one working.)
posted by ook at 8:34 AM on January 25, 2021

On Amazon cards I've had in the past (a Prime Store Card and a Prime Visa from Chase) a rough description of the purchase showed up on the card statement. Like, "AMAZON RETAIL SEATTLE WA Echo Flex - Plug-in mini smart SHIPPING AND TAX" or "AMZN CON PRIME NOW MKT SEATTLE WA Coolhaus Ice Cream, Chocolate Against The Grain Gluten Free Lime Regular Conventional." Can you just take a look at the statement directly?
posted by mskyle at 8:34 AM on January 25, 2021 [3 favorites]

These were steadily racking up fees but were sneaking past our subscription-radar by hiding in the general Amazon bucket. The only way I found them was to sit there in Mint and search for "9.99", "8.99", etc.

So--the Amazon card IS getting picked up by Mint, it's just that all of the transactions are showing as "Amazon" because Amazon is the singular vendor you are purchasing from. Yes? If I go on a spree at Costco and swipe my Visa 3 times at the gas station, pharmacy, and checkout lane, they're all going to show up as Costco because Costco is the singular vendor. Or if I go to McDonald's for coffee in the morning and a big mac at night, those are both going to show up as McDonald's. If your credit card statement doesn't know the granularity of what you're purchasing, neither will Mint.

You and your spouse both need to get into the habit of going into Mint and categorizing your purchases at least once a week. It's good practice and it's the best way to solve this issue.
posted by phunniemee at 8:36 AM on January 25, 2021 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I do this by downloading my Amazon order history into a spreadsheet, and tracking it that way. It's cumbersome but doable. You can export your orders on this page (get here by clicking "my account", then "download order history"). That gets you a CSV file which can be imported into Excel, Numbers, Google Spreadsheets, etc.
posted by jacobian at 8:51 AM on January 25, 2021 [4 favorites]

I use YNAB, but I assume Mint is similar. The problem is transactions appear and you don't know what they are, what category to file them under, etc. Here's how I handle this. This is basically your Idea 1. It's fiddly but it might be less fiddly than you think.

I log in to Chase (which manages the Amazon card), find the transaction (Ctrl-F to search by $ amount if it's not obvious), then click the little right arrow to expand details, then the Amazon order number is right there as a clickable link. If you click the order number and your browser is logged in to the Amazon account that made the purchase, you can see the order and file it appropriately. If my partner's account made it then the link won't work, so I copy and paste it, and then search their order history. I have their account open in another browser because I find that quicker, but Amazon.com has a "switch accounts" button too.
posted by caek at 9:27 AM on January 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

If you hover over or click to expand the Amazon transactions in mint, it will list the items purchased in that order (or at least some of them, there is a character limit). We go through our mint transactions twice a month and categorize them.
posted by jessica fletcher did it at 9:49 AM on January 25, 2021

I also have this problem and I think it's by design. The harder it is to check your store card, the less it feels like you are spending real money on Amazon purchases.

Ask yourself - if having the store card saves you 5%, but you spend 10% more in additional purchases, is that worth it?

I haven't cancelled my Amazon card yet, but I have strongly considered it.
posted by bbqturtle at 10:11 AM on January 25, 2021

Response by poster: Jessica Fletcher - I just checked and when I do that, I get a message like this "Appears on your Chase Bank Credit Card (Amazon.com) (Amazon Card) statement as AMZN Mktp US*4TXXXXXX on Jan 22"

Do you get more info than that? That would solve most of my concerns.
posted by cgs at 10:18 AM on January 25, 2021

I use QuickBooks Self-Employed, which costs about $5/mo, and I'm 93% certain it integrates with Amazon in a way that it can tell you what the purchase was. There may be a lesser version of QB that does this as well.
posted by MonsieurBon at 10:27 AM on January 25, 2021

If I understand correctly, the problem is that you can see the transactions on your shared credit card, but you can't match them with Amazon orders that were made in your spouse's Amazon account unless you log into their account.

One possible solution is to forward all of your Amazon order confirmation emails to the other spouse. That way you both have visibility into all Amazon orders regardless of which account.
posted by JackFlash at 10:44 AM on January 25, 2021

I am a personal-finance writer. I deal with this stuff all the time. Amazon SUCKS for figuring out spending. It drives me nuts. I'm a manual-entry guy (for a lot of reasons, I don't like automated tracking tools and urge people to do manual entry when possible), so I look through all of our many Amazon purchases each month. The numbers often fail to match up. It makes me not want to use Amazon.

Some possible solutions:

• As mentioned above, manually track your spending. There are many, many reasons to do this, and catching errors and tracking habits are two of them. Things like your STARZ subscription are less likely to "sneak by". But I know from experience that you're likely to dismiss this suggestion outright.
• Have each person use their own card when making purchases. My girlfriend and I share an Amazon account, but she uses her credit card when buying things, and I use mine. This generally works okay — except when Amazon decides that our "subscribe and save" coffee should be billed to my business card for some reason instead of the regular card we use for every other "subscribe and save" item.
• Keep a simple log (written? spreadsheet?) tracking Amazon purchases. Even with as much as my girlfriend and I order, this wouldn't really be a hassle especially if I were to take the lead on it. Your mileage may vary.

There's a lot about Amazon's systems that suck. I'm not sure it's so much by design as by LACK of design. So much of the site and interface feels kluged together.
posted by jdroth at 11:55 AM on January 25, 2021

One possible solution is to forward all of your Amazon order confirmation emails to the other spouse. That way you both have visibility into all Amazon orders regardless of which account.

This doesn't work any more. Amazon has removed basically all useful information from their order confirmation emails, presumably to prevent Google and other entities scanning their contents with data mining tools.
posted by caek at 4:01 PM on January 25, 2021 [1 favorite]