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

The purchases people forget 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. No app on the App Store can see your Apple Pay taps directly, and we are not going to ask for your bank credentials to get 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, the transaction appears in your log. The whole chain runs on your iPhone, so there is no server in between and nothing to reconnect the next time a bank redesigns its login page.

We will be honest about the cost of this: it means Cash Book comes to the front after you pay. That is Shortcuts doing its job, not a bug, and some people find it irritating for the first week. Most stop noticing.

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 thing. Every Apple Pay tap from now on opens Cash Book, writes the purchase with the amount and merchant filled in, and hands you back to whatever you were doing.

What lands in the log

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

The trigger only fires for Wallet, though. Pay with the plastic card in your pocket, or with cash, and nothing happens at all. Those are the ones the keypad and voice logging are for. Used together, the gap between what you spent and what you logged closes to about nothing.

Setting it up without guessing

If you want screenshots of every step, plus what to do when the Transaction trigger refuses to show up in the list, read how to track Apple Pay purchases automatically. It is written for someone who has never opened Shortcuts before, because most people never have.

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