The hardest part of budgeting isn't the math. It's remembering to log what you spent. Every budget app I've tried eventually died the same death: I forgot to enter a few purchases, the numbers drifted from reality, and I stopped trusting the data.
Apple Pay knows about every tap-to-pay purchase the moment it happens. If I could pipe that into my budget app automatically, I'd never miss a transaction again. Turns out iOS has a way to do this. It's just not obvious, and it's a little broken.
Since iOS 17, the Shortcuts app has a personal automation trigger called Transaction. It fires every time you complete an Apple Pay or Apple Card purchase. The trigger provides three magic variables: Merchant, Amount, and Card Name.
In theory, you wire this trigger to an app action, pass in the three variables, and you've got zero-effort transaction logging. In practice, Apple's implementation has a known issue: the amount and merchant fields sometimes come through empty. The trigger fires, but the data is partially missing.
This is a dealbreaker if your automation tries to create a finished transaction. A budget entry without an amount is useless. But it's not a dealbreaker if you think about it differently.
The insight is simple: don't try to create a complete transaction automatically. Instead, capture whatever data the trigger provides and save it as a draft. A draft is a placeholder that says "something happened, here's what I know." You review it later, fill in any gaps, assign a category, and promote it to a real transaction.
This works because even a partial draft is useful. If you get the merchant and amount, you just need to add a category. If you only get the merchant, you still know what you bought and roughly when. If you get nothing, you at least have a timestamped reminder that a purchase happened. Any of these is better than forgetting entirely.
In Finthemis, drafts are stored separately from transactions. They don't affect your rule balances or spending totals until you review and complete them. This keeps your budget accurate while giving you a safety net for capture.
The setup takes about two minutes in the Shortcuts app:
That's it. Every Apple Pay purchase now creates a draft in Finthemis. Open the app when convenient, review the drafts list, fill in categories, and save.
The Transaction trigger is genuinely buggy. In my testing, the amount field fails to populate maybe a third of the time. The merchant name is more reliable but occasionally comes through mangled or empty. This isn't a Finthemis issue — it's an Apple issue that affects any app trying to use this trigger.
The amount also arrives as a currency type that doesn't always coerce cleanly to a number. We handle this by accepting it as a string and parsing it with locale-aware decimal handling. Edge cases like comma-as-decimal-separator currencies work correctly.
The other subtlety is that the Shortcuts action runs outside the normal app lifecycle. The app might not be running when a purchase happens. So the action writes directly to the data folder on disk rather than going through the app's in-memory state. When you next open Finthemis, it picks up the new drafts automatically.
Manual transaction logging will always be more accurate on a per-entry basis. You're there, you know what you bought, you can categorize it immediately. But automation wins on consistency. One forgotten lunch compounds into a week of drift, and suddenly your entertainment budget looks flush because three restaurant charges are missing.
The draft approach gives you both. Automation handles the capture, you handle the categorization. The machine does what it's good at (noticing every purchase) and you do what you're good at (knowing that the coffee shop charge was actually a work meeting).
If Apple fixes the Transaction trigger to reliably provide all three fields, this gets even better. But even today, with the bugs, it's the most reliable way I've found to keep a budget in sync with reality.
Finthemis captures Apple Pay transactions as drafts via iOS Shortcuts. Review them on your schedule, keep your budget accurate without the manual grind.
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