Validating Amazon Charges on Chase CC

[frayne]

My method is simple, whenever I buy something online from Amazon or most other retailers, I receive a confirmation email, which I save in a designated folder in my email program. I use these emails to verify charges on my monthly VISA statement. Occasionally, charges are combined with other purchases, but they’re still easy to reconcile using the emails and the Amazon orders page. In all my years of doing this, I’ve never encountered an unauthorized charge or a billing error. Easy peasy

 

[audreyh1]

My method is simple, whenever I buy something online from Amazon or most other retailers, I receive a confirmation email, which I save in a designated folder in my email program. I use these emails to verify charges on my monthly VISA statement. Occasionally, charges are combined with other purchases, but they’re still easy to reconcile using the emails and the Amazon orders page. In all my years of doing this, I’ve never encountered an unauthorized charge or a billing error. Easy peasy

That’s right, they send out confirmation emails.

Even better they have invoices online on your “Returns & Orders” page that correspond to each shipment and charge, and these are detailed and itemized. These invoices would be good to save if you want your own copy of that record.

 

[Scuba]

Log into Amazon, select 'Returns & Orders' and then scroll to whichever order I'm looking for. Then click 'View Invoice' to bring up the order invoice. You'll find the itemized charges.

This is what I used to do, but I did find it quite time-consuming. I never found a situation where I was overcharged or not given credit for a return, so now I haven't been reconciling it. I do notice when I take a return in for shipment that I typically receive an email shortly thereafter saying I'm getting credit.

 

[pb4uski]

Description? Order qty? Seems like it should be awfully easy for it to look like a regular retail receipt. Brand Name item name qty price.

All that info is immediately below the screen shot that I posted but I didn't want to share the details of the sex toys that I ordered.

 

[jazz4cash]

I can’t believe the hoops people are jumping through all the while saying it’s easy! Is this the case with other credit accounts? I use Fidelity Visa 4x more than Amazon Chase and it is much easier to valudate charges to the card (generally). Fidelity does frequently identify the amount without specifying the merchant but usually not a problem.

 

[audreyh1]

I can’t believe the hoops people are jumping through all the while saying it’s easy! Is this the case with other credit accounts? I use Fidelity Visa 4x more than Amazon Chase and it is much easier to valudate charges to the card (generally). Fidelity does frequently identify the amount without specifying the merchant but usually not a problem.

No, because other credit accounts you generally have multiple merchants and amounts. However if you have just Amazon charges on your CC statement and a lot of them it may be more work.

I don’t have trouble because the Amazon Store card statement lists enough item details for each charge to quickly categorize transactions, and I’m not trying to track or describe exactly each item I ordered in Quicken. It’s quick for me.

 

[ncbill]

I don't subdivide Amazon purchases, everything there gets characterized as "shopping" in Monarch Money.

Groceries are all bought locally, though.

 

[audreyh1]

I ended up with both the Amazon Store Card from Synchrony Bank and the Chase Amazon card. Turns out there's no foreign transaction fee on the Chase card, so that'll be a nice backup when traveling.

The Citi Costco Visa perks exceeded what the Chase Amazon card offered, so ultimately that card wasn’t useful to us. And Citi even dropped the no foreign transaction fee many years ago becoming our favorite travel CC. Prior to that I already had other no FTF cards for overseas travel.

 

[CaptTom]

The Citi Costco Visa perks exceeded what the Chase Amazon card offered, so ultimately that card wasn’t useful to us. And Citi even dropped the no foreign transaction fee many years ago becoming our favorite travel CC. Prior to that I already had other no FTF cards for overseas travel.

Interesting. The Citi card we normally use (2% cash back on everything) still has a 3% foreign transaction fee. Too bad, I would have used that one. I couldn't find this fee on line. I ended up having to request a paper (!) copy of the card agreement to verify they still charge foreign transaction fees.

I was also surprised that the MC from our local bank also has no foreign fee, gives 1.9% cash back. So that's going to be our primary for traveling, with the Amazon Chase as backup, and a local credit union card as secondary backup (no cash back on that one, but also no fee.)

 

[Cobra9777]

Thanks everyone. I did some more research and discovered a Chrome extension called Amazon Order History Reporter. It scrapes your order history and creates a CSV file, very similar to the old Amazon Order History Report. You can do this at the Order level or Item level... and you can specify various time periods, but oddly, not a specific date range. There's also a paid version with more features, which I have not tried.

Obviously, I have some security concerns. But you don't supply any credentials. You have to be logged in to Amazon before running the tool. It's only permission in Chrome is to read the Orders data. FWIW, the privacy policy says they do not collect, use, or sell your data.

All that said, in my early testing, it seems to have many of the same problems as the original Amazon report tool... dates don't match, and on the item-level report, amounts don't match. Anyway, I've downloaded a couple different reports into Excel and, while I'm skeptical, I'm still experimenting to see if this might be a more automated solution.

 

[audreyh1]

Interesting. The Citi card we normally use (2% cash back on everything) still has a 3% foreign transaction fee. Too bad, I would have used that one. I couldn't find this fee on line. I ended up having to request a paper (!) copy of the card agreement to verify they still charge foreign transaction fees.

I was also surprised that the MC from our local bank also has no foreign fee, gives 1.9% cash back. So that's going to be our primary for traveling, with the Amazon Chase as backup, and a local credit union card as secondary backup (no cash back on that one, but also no fee.)

The Costco Citi Visa has 3% back on restaurants, hotels and general travel. Once they dropped the FTF it became our main card overseas as well as in the US.

 

[More Cowbell]

The Costco Citi Visa has 3% back on restaurants, hotels and general travel. Once they dropped the FTF it became our main card overseas as well as in the US.

I must have missed the notice when Costco Citi Visa dropped FTF, so that’s good to know. That’s the only credit card I carry in my wallet on a daily basis.

Do you have the Costco Citi Visa card in your Apple Wallet (default?) and use Apple Pay via your watch during Costco checkout? I have yet to use my watch to pay there, either use the physical card or less frequently, the app (did not work on self checkout the last time I tried.)

 

[meleana]

This is what I do: First go on Chase, go to your statement and print out the page with the charges on it (no need to print every page, just the one with the charges). With that hard copy in hand, go to Amazon and go to your orders. Each line on your Chase statement will have the Amazon order number associated with it, so if you don't immediately recognize it by the amount and/or date, look for the order number. I then make a note on the statement as to what type of expense it is, so I can total them by type and record them in my spreadsheet, but if you just want to verify that it is a legitimate charge, you can simply tick them off as you go. Low tech? Certainly. But I find this method to be quick and easy.

This is what I do. I don’t find it that hard at all.

 

[audreyh1]

I must have missed the notice when Costco Citi Visa dropped FTF, so that’s good to know. That’s the only credit card I carry in my wallet on a daily basis.

Do you have the Costco Citi Visa card in your Apple Wallet (default?) and use Apple Pay via your watch during Costco checkout? I have yet to use my watch to pay there, either use the physical card or less frequently, the app (did not work on self checkout the last time I tried.)

It was several years ago - Jan 2018. I learned about it here!

In Europe we generally use ApplePay with our watch. We almost never use the physical card as almost everyone takes ApplePay there. At Costco I usually use the watch at checkout but rarely there is some issue and I take out the physical card. It’s not currently the default.

 

[Montecfo]

Sorry, a bit late to the party. I found this thread googling the problem I was having recording Amazon Prime (Chase) CC transactions in detail in Quicken. I certainly do not want a new step in the process (logging into amazon etc). We (actually only one of us) seems to be using this card more and more. Well in spurts. I thought downloading transaction detail might make it easier but that seems to not be the case.

Of course I could go back to Scuba's thread about stopping recording this stuff in detail. But I am not ready to do that and also need some of the recordkeeping specifically for medical but also for travel spending etc.

What I have learned is that a lot of folks are probably having similar issues. I think we may want to just use our primary card which is the Costco card. But we will see.

 

[easysurfer]

Seems to me the Chase statement of my Amazon card is always slow. I've learned to only record the cc balance on my credit card after it shows up on my checkbook statement's auto balance pay. But I'm not complaining as I like the 5% Prime cashback too much to complain .

 

[Zona]

This may sound onerous to some, but here's how I track credit card spending instead of just lumping everything in Quicken as "credit card" or "Amazon". I have all our Credit Cards set up to email me for any charge over $1. As the emails come into my gmail, I mark them with a "star" and also forward them to myself with an explanation of what the charge is. So that "$15 Amazon" charge email gets re-forwarded with a short description like "screen door repair part" or whatever it is, and marked as "read" with the star. Then when I do the "One Step Update" in Quicken, I match the amounts to my starred emails and unclick the star in gmail once I've categorized it as "House Maintenance" or whatever in Quicken. That way my "read/starred" emails is almost always just a list of credit card charges that haven't yet come thru on the Quicken update. It may not be the best system but so far it works and isn't too much effort for me.

 

[pb4uski]

Try Amazon Transactions

It gives me easy access to the details of each Amazon credit card charge.

 

[audreyh1]

Try Amazon Transactions

It gives me easy access to the details of each Amazon credit card charge.

You have to click on a link for each item. My Amazon store card statement is more informative than this as is the regular Amazon order history online.

 

[pb4uski]

The order history often doesn't align with credit card charges if you have numerous orders being processed at the same time and parts of orders are being shipped at different times.

That is why I don't use order history. Transaction history aligns with the credit card charges.

But if it works for you then by all means, do you.

 

[audreyh1]

My credit card statement lists up to 4 items per charge and that usually good enough. But this is the Amazon Store Card issued by Synchrony, not the Amazon Chase Visa.

 

[Cobra9777]

I started this thread 4 months ago. Since then, I've tried several methods mentioned here. Many are OK for a small number of Amazon transactions. But for 30+ orders/mo, they were onerous and very time-consuming.

The Amazon transaction page that pb4uski keeps mentioning is definitely helpful. Using $ amount, I can manually match each transaction on the Chase statement with the corresponding transaction record on Amazon. From there, it's one click to the order details. However, I still find it simpler and quicker to work from the online Chase statement. Chase also provides links to the exact same Amazon order page. But there's no manual matching on $ amount.

Either way, it's still a very time-consuming, manual process. Same for the Amazon store card that audreyh1 has mentioned a few times. Unlike Chase, it does provide some item-level information on the printed statement, which is helpful. But not all items are shown for each order, and there's no breakout of the amount by item. So you still need to delve into the Amazon order details for most transactions.

The Chrome extension I found was also a dead-end. It's an amateurish re-creation of the old Amazon Order History Report. It's the only approach that sort-of "feels" automated. But there are so many issues with the data that it requires extensive manipulation in Excel, and usually a line-by-line reconciliation. So it's not really any faster than the manual methods. Maybe with practice...? Maybe with the paid version...?

Anyway, since somebody resurrected this thread, I thought I'd provide an update of what I've found. No automated solutions, unfortunately. And a bunch of good manual solutions, but mostly just variations on what I'm already doing. Still, it's been very helpful to try some alternative approaches.

 

[audreyh1]

Methinks you are trying to capture too much detail? When you go to a grocery store do you try to categorize each item on your receipt in Quicken? We use pretty broad categories and only occasionally split a specific credit card charge. Makes quick work and it’s really good enough for tracking our overall spending.

 

[braumeister]

Methinks you are trying to capture too much detail? When you go to a grocery store do you try to categorize each item on your receipt in Quicken? We use pretty broad categories and only occasionally split a specific credit card charge. Makes quick work and it’s really good enough for tracking our overall spending.

I can certainly understand the frustration if you really like to keep detailed track of everything.
I actually record all purchases (except those I make with cash) in Moneydance, so I have a good record of it all.
But categorizing things at a detailed level is too onerous for me. I have just seven categories:

• Auto related
• Cash, entertainment, groceries and dining
• Hobby and travel
• House and utilities
• Medical
• Miscellaneous
• Taxes

That makes it quick to pick one when I make an Amazon purchase or anything else. I know many here would go nuts with such broad groups, but it has worked for me for a couple of decades now.

 

[Cobra9777]

Methinks you are trying to capture too much detail? When you go to a grocery store do you try to categorize each item on your receipt in Quicken? We use pretty broad categories and only occasionally split a specific credit card charge. Makes quick work and it’s really good enough for tracking our overall spending.

I have 19 categories. Our Amazon purchases typically hit 9 or 10 of them: home maintenance, car maintenance, entertainment (video subscriptions), groceries, clothing, household supplies, gifts, medical, home improvement, and misc. Most of our orders have more than 1 item and it's very common for one order to cross 2 or 3 categories.

For a while, I had given up on this because it took so long every month. So I just let Full-View auto-categorize all Amazon purchases as "general merchandise." Problem is: we've had some streaming subscriptions go on way longer than intended because I wasn't looking at the details. I've also had some returns that never got credited. But also, as we've started buying more and more on Amazon, it seems pretty useless to put everything in one category.

But beyond all that, my main goal is just to revalidate all the transactions before it auto-pays. But I can't do that by looking at the statement... every line item just says "Amazon.com." I have to go through this process if I want to revalidate. Splitting transactions and correcting categories is not the main goal, but it's pretty simple once you've gone through the detail.

So I guess the bigger question is: Should I just give up on re-validation when the statement arrives. I'm thinking... no.