How to track your Amazon spending in Australia

Amazon is very good at showing you what you bought. It is not interested in showing you what you spent. There is no running total on amazon.com.au, no breakdown by category, and no "this month compared to last month". If you have ever wondered where a few hundred dollars went, you already know the feeling.

Here are four ways to get the number, roughly in order of effort.

1. Read it off Your Orders

Go to Returns & Orders and change the filter from the last three months to a full year. Every order is there, with its total.

What you do not get is a sum. You have to add the orders up yourself, and an order split across several shipments makes that harder than it sounds. It works for a quick look at one month. It is miserable for a year.

2. Ask Amazon for your data

Amazon used to offer a downloadable order report. It has since removed it. What is left is the privacy tool: under your account settings you can request your data, choose your order history, and Amazon will email you a bundle of spreadsheet files once it is ready.

The catch is the wait, which can run to days, and the files themselves, which are built for completeness and not for reading. You will need a spreadsheet and some patience to turn them into anything useful. It is a snapshot, too: next month you do it all again.

3. Go through your bank statement

Search your statement for Amazon and add up the lines. This is the only method that shows what actually left your account, refunds included.

It has two problems. The statement tells you how much but never what, so a $62.40 line could be printer ink or a birthday present. And one order often turns into several charges, because Amazon bills each shipment as it leaves the warehouse. Matching those back to orders by hand is slow.

4. Let your order emails do the work

Every Amazon order sends you a confirmation email, and that email already contains what a budget needs: the item names, the prices, the date and the order number. The information is sitting in your inbox. It just is not added up.

This is the approach Almanac takes. You get a personal forwarding address, and any order email you send to it becomes rows in a budget, sorted into categories, with a total and a graph. You can forward emails one at a time, or set up a filter in your email so that every new Amazon confirmation is forwarded on its own and you never think about it again.

To catch up on the past, search your inbox for emails from amazon.com.au with "order" in the subject, and forward the ones you care about.

Two things worth knowing:

• Nothing connects to your bank. Almanac only ever sees the emails you choose to send it. There is no bank login, now or later.
• It reads other shops too. iHerb, AliExpress and McDonald's receipts work the same way, which matters because Amazon is rarely the whole story.

Which one should you use?

If you want	Use
A rough figure for one month	Your Orders, and a calculator
Every order you have ever made, once	Request your data
What truly left your account, refunds and all	Your bank statement
A running total that keeps itself up to date	Forward your order emails

Most people who start with the first option end up wanting the last one, because the question is never really "what did I spend in March". It is "what am I spending", and that answer has to stay current to be useful.

If that sounds like you, Almanac is free to start and takes about a minute to set up. The FAQ covers how forwarding works and what happens to your data.