Apple Pay Expense Tracker, Every Tap Logs Itself | Cash Book

The purchases people forget to log are the small card taps: the coffee, the parking, the bus. Cash Book can log those itself, and it does it without ever touching your bank.

Why it is a Shortcut and not a bank login

Apple does not give apps an API for card transactions. Nothing on the App Store can see your Apple Pay taps directly, and Cash Book will not ask for your bank credentials to work around that. What Apple does provide is a Transaction trigger inside the Shortcuts app, which fires on the phone the moment a Wallet card is used.

Cash Book plugs into that trigger. Wallet tells Shortcuts a purchase happened, Shortcuts runs the Cash Book action Log purchase, and the transaction appears in your log. The whole chain runs on your iPhone. There is no server in between and nothing to reconnect when a bank changes its login page.

The one-time setup, step by step

In Cash Book, open Settings, then Automation, and find Apple Pay Auto-Logging: "Log every card tap automatically". The rest happens in Apple's Shortcuts app:

1. Open Shortcuts and tap Automation at the bottom.
2. Tap New Automation, or the plus in the corner.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the list. Under Wallet, tap Transaction. You need iOS 17 or later and a card already in Wallet for it to appear.
4. Choose Run Immediately so it does not ask you every time. Tap Next.
5. Tap New Blank Automation, then Add Action, and search for Cash Book. Pick Log purchase.
6. Tap the Amount field in the action and choose the Amount from the Transaction trigger. Do the same for Merchant.
7. Tap Done.

That is the whole setup. From now on, every Apple Pay tap opens Cash Book, writes the purchase with the amount and merchant filled in, and you are back to what you were doing.

What lands in the log

An auto-logged purchase looks like any other transaction on Home. The merchant is the note, the amount is exact, the date is the moment of the tap, and the tag is matched from the merchant when Cash Book has seen it before. Open it to change the tag, put it on a different card in your accounts, or add a note about what the twelve euros actually were.

Because the trigger only fires for Wallet, a purchase with a plastic card that bypasses Wallet, or with cash, does not appear on its own. Those are the ones the keypad and voice logging are for. Between the three, the gap between what you spent and what you logged closes to nothing.

Setting it up without guessing

If you would like screenshots of every step, plus what to do when the Transaction trigger does not show, read how to track Apple Pay purchases automatically. It is written for someone who has never opened Shortcuts before.

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