Track Apple Pay purchases automatically with iOS Shortcuts

An iOS Shortcuts automation can add every tap-to-pay purchase on the cards you pick to Skwad. Each time you tap one of those cards, it emails the merchant, name, and amount to your Skwad Scan address, and Skwad creates the transaction. You set it up once in the Shortcuts app with the Transaction trigger.

“I think this app is great and solves the problem that has caused me to stop using like 5+ budget apps!” Peter, Skwad user

My bank doesn’t do email alerts. I pay with that card through Apple Wallet almost every time, though, so I had Shortcuts forward each tap to Skwad. Here’s my setup.

Using the Skwad iPhone app

If you have the Skwad app on your iPhone, use these instructions instead.

Automatically create a Skwad transaction on Apple Wallet card tap

1. Open the ‘Shortcuts’ app and go to the ‘Automation’ tab.
2. Tap ’+’ for a new automation and pick ‘Transaction’.
3. Pick the cards that should set it off, choose ‘Run Immediately’, and turn on the notification if you want a ping each time it runs. You can narrow it to certain spending categories or merchants. I want every purchase, so I leave all categories selected and skip the merchant filter. Mine looks like this:

4. Hit ‘Next’. On the screen after that, pick ‘New Blank Automation’.
5. ‘Add Action’, then search ‘Text’.
6. In the text field, I typed three labels, one per line:

Merchant:
Name:
Amount:

7. Beside each line, tap ‘Select Variable’ and choose ‘Shortcut Input’.

8. Tap each of those three ‘Shortcut Input’ links and swap in the matching variable:

9. Tap the ‘Search for apps and actions’ bar and search for ‘Send’. The action you want comes from Apple’s built-in ‘Mail’ app. Gmail has a ‘Send Email’ action too, but it doesn’t seem to work.
10. Point it at the ‘Text’ from step 5, send it to your Skwad Scan email address, and give it a subject like ‘Transaction’.
11. Tap the arrow to open the extra options and switch off ‘Show Compose Sheet’. Now the email goes out on its own, no tap from you. It should look like this:

12. Tap ‘Done’ to save it.

Done. Pay with one of those cards and the purchase lands in Skwad. It runs through your Skwad Scan email address, and it pairs well with tracking Apple Card purchases in Skwad. For older history, see how to import old transactions.

Bonus: create a Skwad transaction from your bank’s app

My second shortcut works from the bank’s own app. It screenshots the transaction on screen, reads the text, and emails what it finds to Skwad. The first three steps are the same for any bank:

1. In ‘Shortcuts’, make a new shortcut.
2. Its first action: ‘Take Screenshot’.
3. Then search ‘Search for apps and actions’ for ‘Extract Text’, and set it to read the screenshot from step 1.

After that, it depends on how your bank lays out a transaction. Roughly: pull the bits you need out of the text from step 3, put them in a ‘Text’ action, and email that to your Skwad Scan address.

This is the one I run on my Wealthsimple app:

The ‘Match’ step grabs one piece of text with a regex. Wealthsimple puts the merchant name on the line just before the word “Account”, so (.)+?(?=\nAccount) picks up the characters in front of it.

You can skip the regex entirely. Run the extracted text through the “Split variable by New Line” action, then use ‘Get Item from List’ to pull a line by its number. Your bank’s app will likely show every transaction in the same layout, so the merchant and the amount will probably be on the same line numbers each time. Find those two numbers once and you’re set.

To find them, drop a ‘Show’ action anywhere in the shortcut. It puts whatever you hand it on screen. Point it at the split text and you can read off which line holds what.

I run mine with Back Tap. To set that up:

1. ‘Settings’ › ‘Accessibility’
2. ‘Touch’
3. ‘Back Tap’
4. Assign your shortcut to either ‘Double Tap’ or ‘Triple Tap’

Now open the transaction in your bank’s app, tap the back of your phone two or three times, and the shortcut sends it to Skwad.

Here it is running: