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Answering “How Much Did I Spend on Amazon?”

Here's how to easily track your Amazon spending by using two one-click profiles connected to a single Tiller-powered Google Spreadsheet.

Ever ask yourself “How much did I spend on Amazon?”

After all, if you’re one of the 100 million members with Prime, you probably spend over $1,000 on Amazon purchases per year. But knowing exactly how much you spent can be rather difficult.

So how do you track all that Amazon spending?

There are several ways you can track your Amazon spending:

Alternatively, here’s the simple workflow I use with my family to keep up with our Amazon spending. It uses two one-click profiles, each with a separate credit card.

Transactions from both cards are automatically fed into our family Foundation Budget in Google Sheets powered by Tiller. But you can use this method even if you’re not currently using Tiller to track your finances.

First, think of how you categorize expenses

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A benefit of managing your money in a spreadsheet compared to most finance tools is you’re not forced to use someone else’s category schema. You’re free to use custom categories that match your way of thinking.

Our family uses a small set of broad categories in our Tiller spreadsheet:

  1. We group a lot of our transactions into a “Living” category for those things we can’t live without.
  2. We use “Discretionary” for optional expenses that are nice but not needed.

In the following example, we started buying 25-pound bags of Bob’s Red Mill muesli for $98. (Our local grocery couldn’t reliably stock muesli, which is a family staple.)

That Amazon order adds up to the same dollar amount as the DryGuy DX Forced Air Boot Dryer combined with a favorite new book, Training for the Uphill Athlete: A Manual for Mountain Runners and Ski Mountaineers.

The bag of muesli is breakfast food and should be categorized as a Living expense in our Tiller sheet. The boot dryer and book are categorized as a Discretionary expense.

We combine Amazon’s one-click feature, combined with a second credit card and Tiller’s Autocat category ruleset to automate a way to stay on top of it all.  

Note: The method below makes it easy to track my Amazon spending by total order amount. Read the linked instructions if you want to categorize every individual item you buy from Amazon.

Step 1: Our Amazon account has two linked credit cards

One card happens to be an Amazon card, but of course you can use any credit card, debit card, or checking account with Amazon.

Our first card is the Amazon Prime Rewards Visa Signature Card (no annual fee and 5% cash back). Our second card is the USAA Signature Visa (no annual fee and 2.5% cash back).

Step 2: We then use two sets of one-click profiles

The first is addressed to “Living – Polson Family” and it uses the Amazon Chase card we use for all living expenses.

The second one-click profile is “Discretionary – Polson Family” which uses our USAA Signature card for all discretionary expenses.

When it comes time to place an order, we choose the right one-click profile by clicking the blue “Deliver to” link first. This gives us the option of choosing our Living – Polson Family profile or our Discretionary – Polson Family profile.

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With the right profile selected, we choose “Buy now”

Because each one-click profile is linked to a different card, the Amazon transactions are easy to distinguish in our Tiller sheet, even if they’re lumped with other orders that ship that day (as this book was lumped with a boot dryer).

In this spreadsheet, I can easily tell the muesli (top line with the USAA Visa) versus the book and boot dryer (bottom line with the Amazon card).

Step 3: Automate with AutoCat

Better yet, we can automate this workflow with AutoCat.

Most of our AutoCat rules only need a description. However, with Amazon transactions, we also have AutoCat look for the account name.

If the Account name contains USAA, AutoCat with categorize it as a Discretionary expense. And if the Account contains Amazon, AutoCat knows it’s a Living expense.

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Financial control comes easiest in our family if we can achieve order with the least amount of effort

This Amazon workflow ensures that a quick decision at the time of purchase provides invaluable visibility into our Amazon purchases as they later appear in our Tiller sheet.

Financial control comes easiest in our family if we can achieve order with the least amount of effort

By the way, the same workflow holds true at big box stores like Costco. When you load the checkout conveyor belt, put your living items first. Add a divider. Then ring up your discretionary items separately with a different card.

You don’t need to worry about receipts and splits. The two transactions on two cards will do it for you. And if you’re using AutoCat, it will appear in your Tiller sheet just as you want it.

Peter Polson

Peter Polson

Peter loves designing great products and creating tools and systems that help people live better lives. He was a founder and president of Junxion (acquired by Sierra Wireless) and later CEO at Dashwire (acquired by HTC). He enjoys most activities around mountains and water, especially skiing and hiking with his family.

4 Comments

  1. I’ve always felt like Amazon is a huge black hole when it comes to understanding your spending with tools like Tiller unfortunately. This is a nice “hack” to help with that a bit but aren’t you then deciding to miss out on more savings by using the 2nd card? You get a better % cash back with the Amazon card.

    • Great question. There’s a workaround to get 5%.

      You can create a second Amazon Visa for another household member. Amazon limits one Visa per account, but creating a new Amazon account and adding a new Visa are both free, even if you don’t intend to use that second Amazon account much or ever. You can even share Prime with that second Amazon account for free, ensuring the new Visa earns 5%.

      Once you have your second Amazon Visa, use it as your second payment source on your primary Amazon account. Now everything you buy with both Visas on your primary Amazon account will earn 5% for Prime members.

  2. Hi and thanks for this tip. I use Amazon a lot but never really got into using the one click. I guess I like the process of seeing the items in the cart and choosing the delivery options (although its almost always the same choice). I run a few Airbnb’s and I have a specific credit card that I use just for those purchases related to the airbnb properties. Although I don’t use the one click profiles I get a similar result of differentiated categories by choosing a different payment instrument when I check out. Also, is there a way to have multiple items in your cart but purchase them with different cards? I am guessing not but thought you might have come across this. Thanks

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