How to see what each Amazon item cost, for a budget or for taxes

Why one charge is not enough

A budget app sees one line for a box. But that box might hold a printer cartridge, a birthday gift and a bag of dog food. In a budget they belong to three categories. At tax time, perhaps only one of them is a business expense.

Two things make this harder than it looks.

• One order can ship in several boxes, and your card may be charged once per shipment. The card lines do not match the order lines.
• Tax and shipping are charged on the order, not on one item.

The free way, step by step

1. Open Your Orders in Amazon and find the order.
2. Open its invoice. It shows each item's price, the tax, the shipping, any promotion, and the total.
3. Copy those numbers into your sheet, one row per item.
4. Add one row for tax and shipping, so the rows add up to the amount your card was charged.
5. Match that total to the charge on your statement.

That last check is the useful part. If the item rows plus the tax and shipping row equal the charge, your split is right. If they do not, a promotion, a gift card or a split shipment is usually the reason.

For a few orders a month this is fine. For a year of orders it takes hours. You can also use Amazon's data request, which is free but slow.

If you need it for taxes

For self-employment or a home office, you need the date, the item, what you paid and the tax. Keep the order number next to every row. Then you can find the original invoice if you are ever asked. Keep the invoices too. A spreadsheet is a good index, but it is not a receipt.

Which purchases count as a business expense is a question for a tax professional. We are not one, and this page is not tax advice.

A faster way: Bickford Order Export

Bickford Order Export does the copying. It is a Chrome extension. You open your Amazon orders and click Export my orders. It writes one row per item: date, order number, item, ASIN, quantity, price, seller and status. Each order's subtotal, tax, shipping, promotions and total sit on its first row, so a column sum gives the true total.

With the paid year, there is also a budget-app layout: one line per item, plus one line for the order's tax and shipping. That way each order adds up to the charge on your card, and you can import the file into a budget tool or a sheet and sort by item. It is meant for people who budget in a tool such as Tiller, YNAB or Monarch, or in their own spreadsheet. We have tested the layout against our own budget app's format. We have not tested the import in every tool, so check the first few rows when you import.

• Free: the last 90 days, every column, Excel or CSV.
• $9.99 for a year, paid once, no auto-renewal: every year since your first order, any date range, and the budget layout.
• Nothing leaves your browser. There is no account.
• Amazon.com in the United States only. Walmart and Target are planned, not built.
• Digital orders show totals, but some item prices are not on any page the extension can read.

It is on the Chrome Web Store. Add it to Chrome; installing it is free. It is new and is still being checked on real accounts.

Add to Chrome, free See Bickford Order Export

Not affiliated with Amazon. Amazon is a trademark of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.