You can't get a CSV file of your Apple Card transactions from within Apple Wallet. You must go to the online web site where you can't look at your transactions (That's what Wallet is for?), but you can pay your bill. And you can also download pdfs of your prior months' statements.

Which made me finally pay for a year's worth of PDF Expert. I had a couple of utilities that purportedly could extract tables from pdfs and convert them into Excel spreadsheets, but both failed and have been subsequently deleted.

PDF Expert can do it, but of course, the spreadsheet is ugly as sin, and you have to spend several minutes making it not painful to look at. (I should look into whether there is a kind of saved style I could apply to the whole sheet in one fell swoop. I have a feeling I'll be doing this again.)

You can download a csv file of all your transactions from Amazon. It takes a little time, basically you submit a request and wait for it to be fulfilled. Matter of minutes in my experience.

You get several files, each in its own folder. The one I wanted was Retail.Order.History.1.csv. That isn't a simple matter of applying a style, there are columns of data that aren't useful that must be deleted, useful columns that must be moved to more sensible locations. And then you get to figure out how to group order numbers together, because each item record of a transaction is a row, although you may have ordered several items in a single order. Oddly, the orders aren't grouped together. They mostly are, but you'll find outliers in nearly every order with more than three items. They're usually one or two rows down, inexplicably separated from the rest of the order.

That's important because it's the order total that was charged to the Apple Card, and the number that appears in the order confirmation email you receive from Amazon. That figure never appears in the csv file.

I've been subjecting myself to all of this because I'm having a charge disputed by Goldman Sachs and I want to be absolutely certain that I was in fact correct that the charge that appeared on my card wasn't associated with any order that I made.

So far, I'm fairly certain that I'm correct. I can't find an order confirmation email anywhere near the date of the transaction reported on the card for that amount. There is no order among the record of my orders at the Amazon web site that correlates to that amount. And I downloaded the record of transactions, just to be thorough.

Well... Hold the phone.

(Actually, I just got off the phone.)

Just now, in the middle of writing this post and out of curiosity, I went to the folder of folders of transactions to see if one of those might have been strictly orders, which would have been more helpful. Alas, not the case.

But, there was a Digital Items folder, and so I opened that just to see what it contained. I thought it would be my Kindle book orders, and I haven't bought one recently. There are four .csv files in that Digital Items folder, and a README. The previous folders each contained one .csv file. The only .csv file that contains anything meaningful to me (a human) is Digital Items.csv, the second to the last one in the folder listing, just before the README (which I didn't read).

Sure enough, the first record in the Digital Items.csv is my Amazon Prime renewal, for the amount in question.

Oy!

I seem to recall that I usually received an email from Amazon that Prime would be renewing at such and such a date. All of my Amazon mail went to a single mailbox, and there is no email announcing the upcoming renewal, no email confirmation of renewal, nothing to tell me that they'd charged my card to renew my Prime membership.

So when I got the alert from Apple Card, there was no correspondence from Amazon, no record of a transaction that I could find that explained that charge, and I thought my card must have been skimmed at the movies.

Well...bummer.

"New shit has come to light, man."

So I called Goldman Sachs, didn't have to fuss too much with the automated "assistant" and was able to reach a human being (in a noisy call center) fairly quickly, and withdrew the dispute.

Very frustrating, because I changed my card number too. I still have a couple of recurring charges that have to be updated.

In any event, it also prompted me to change my mailbox setup. I've created separate mailboxes for Amazon Order Confirmation, Amazon Shipping Confirmation and Amazon Delivery Confirmation, and an Amazon Other mailbox.

(All of which suggests I do far too much business with Amazon.)

And now I'm adding Prime renewal to the Calendar, so hopefully this won't happen again.

Yeah, I kinda feel like a dumbass; but I also think Amazon let me down here.

The beat goes on...

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:31 Wednesday, 22 May 2024