Let your phone payments log themselves, on your phone

THE PROBLEM

The expense that never gets logged

You tap your phone, it beeps, done. No receipt to keep and no queue to wait in, so there is none of that fifteen-second gap where you would normally log the expense. It is the payment method that most often escapes tracking.

The industry's usual answer is to connect your bank: you give access to your accounts and charges appear on their own, with their delay and their fees already applied. It works, and in exchange you hand over credentials or authorize an aggregator.

There is a third route almost nobody uses: letting your own phone tell the app you just paid. The data is already on the device, so it never needs to leave it or be seen by anyone else.

THE IDEA

A draft, not an expense

This is the important part and worth understanding before turning it on: Tally saves nothing on its own. Each detected payment sits in a tray called “Detected payments” and does not become a movement until you confirm it.

It is slower than bank sync, and that is the honest trade-off. In exchange, no third party sees your payments and there are no banking credentials anywhere.

• Opening Tally shows you the summary of payments waiting to be reviewed.
• For each one you can fix the amount, date, account, and category before saving.
• You can discard the ones you do not want: a discarded payment leaves no movement.
• Only new payments are captured, from the moment you turn it on: it does not import your Wallet history.
• The feature ships turned off and is enabled by hand from Settings.

ON IPHONE

Setting it up with Apple Pay

On iOS you create the automation yourself, in Apple's Shortcuts app. Tally does not read Apple Wallet and cannot create that automation on its own: it exposes an action, “Save pending payment in Tally”, and you decide when it runs.

It is five minutes of one-time setup. We are not going to tell you it is one tap, because it is not: it is the price of Apple not letting any app read Wallet directly, which is exactly the protection that makes this private.

1. 1

   Turn the feature on in TallyPRO

   Settings › Automation. Requires Tally PRO. Tally opens a guide with these same steps.

2. 2

   Create an automation in Shortcuts

   Open Shortcuts › Automation › New Automation and choose “Wallet”.

3. 3

   Pick your cards

   Select the cards you want to track, choose “Run Immediately”, and tap Next. Cards you do not select produce nothing.

4. 4

   Add Tally's action

   Tap “Create new shortcut”, search for Tally, and select its action.

5. 5

   Connect the data

   In “Amount”, tap Select Variable › Shortcut Input › Amount. Repeat in “Merchant” with Merchant and save. This step is the fiddly one: skip it and the drafts arrive empty.

ON ANDROID

Setting it up with Google Wallet

Android has no Shortcuts, so the route is different: Google Wallet posts a notification when you pay, and you give Tally permission to read notifications. It is a broad permission, which is why Tally uses it as narrowly as possible.

• Tally filters by the Google Wallet package: any other notification is discarded instantly.
• Only three fields are read from the notification: amount, merchant, and currency.
• Full notifications and their original text are not stored.
• None of this leaves the phone.

1. 1

   Turn the feature on in TallyPRO

   Settings › Automation. Requires Tally PRO. Before sending you to the system settings, Tally explains exactly what it will do with the permission.

2. 2

   Grant notification access

   Tally opens the Android screen where it is granted. You can revoke it from there whenever you want.

3. 3

   Pay and review

   Back in Tally you will see the detected payments, ready to review and save.

TO BE CLEAR

What it does not do, stated plainly

This is the easiest feature to describe badly, so here is the list of what does not happen. It is the same one you will see inside the app before turning it on.

• It does not read your bank: there is no bank connection anywhere in the app.
• It does not read Apple Wallet or “all of” Google Wallet: on iOS it receives what your automation sends it; on Android, only Google Wallet's notifications.
• It does not import your history: only payments after you enable it. For earlier months there is statement import.
• It saves nothing without you: every payment is a draft until you confirm it.
• It uploads nothing: the feature makes no network calls, and the draft is created and stored on the device.
• It does not guess the category with AI: it proposes one from what it knows about the merchant and you adjust it.

• For history: importing a CSV, Excel, or Norma 43 statement
• What leaves your phone in each Tally feature

PRIVACY

The most private automation an expense app can have

Because the data does not travel. In an app with a bank connection, your movements pass through the bank, an aggregator, and the app's server. Here they go from your phone's operating system to a database on that same phone.

This is not a statement of intent: the feature contains no calls to the internet at all. Not to Tally's server, not to an analytics service, not to anyone. Put the phone in airplane mode and the drafts would still be created.

The permission is scoped by design too. On iOS you pick card by card in your own automation, and you can delete it whenever you want without touching Tally. On Android you can revoke notification access from the system settings. Either way you are in charge, and nothing needs uninstalling.

FREE AND PRO

What you need

FAQ

Frequently asked questions